Report on Chinese language and it's importance

1. China Survey and Chinese Culture
A report
on
The Chi ese La guage
&
It’s I porta ce
Submitted by:
Ripon Kumar Sikder, PhD Fellow
Institute of Cotton Reseach, CAAS
ID No. 2017Y90100144
Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Zhongguancun Nadajie, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, P. R. China

2. 1
Introduction
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of
hundreds of local language varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Chinese is
spoken by the Han majority and many other ethnic groups in China. Of China's more than 1.3
billion people, approximately 95 percent speak Chinese, as opposed to the non-Chinese
languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, and Tai spoken by minorities. Chinese is also
spoken by large emigrant communities in Southeast Asia, North and South America, and in the
Hawaiian Islands. More people (around 16% of the world's population), in fact, speak Chinese
than any other language in the world; English ranks second in number of speakers and Spanish
third.
As the dominant language of East Asia, Chinese has greatly influenced the writing systems and
vocabularies of neighboring languages not related to it by origin, such as Japanese, Korean, and
Vietnamese. It has been estimated that until the 18th century more than half of the world's
printed books were Chinese. There are roughly 70,000 Chinese characters and phonetic
sounds. An average person has to know about 3,000 characters to be able to read the
newspaper.
Mandarin is the most common Chinese language, and is also the official language of Mainland
China, Taiwan, and one of the official languages of Singapore. According to some estimates,
about 70% of all Chinese speak Mandarin.
A brief History of the Chinese language
In historical linguistics, the history of the Chinese language includes the various changes over
time. Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, a group of languages that all descend
from Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty is that, while there is very good documentation
that allows for the reconstruction of the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written
documentation of the point where Chinese split from the rest of the Sino-Tibetan languages.
This is actually a common problem in historical linguistics, a field which often incorporates
the comparative method to deduce these sorts of changes. Unfortunately the use of this
technique for Sino-Tibetan languages has not as yet yielded satisfactory results, perhaps
because many of the languages that would allow for a more complete reconstruction of Proto-
Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood. Therefore, despite their affinity, the
common ancestry of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages remains an unproven
hypothesis.

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Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first
systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s. The system
was much revised, but always heavily relied on Karlgren's insights and methods.
Old Chinese, sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese," was the language common during the
early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122–256 BC), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze
artifacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history of the Shujing, and portions of the Yijing (I Ching).
The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their
Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in
Japanese, and Vietnamese also provide valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly
uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing
differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old
Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists.
Middle Chinese was the language used during the Sui, Tang and Song dynasties (6th through
10th centuries AD). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rime
dictionary (AD 601) and its later redaction the Guangyun, and a late period in the 10th century,
reflected by rime tables such as the Yunjing. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle
Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rime dictionaries, foreign
transliterations, rime tables constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the
phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all
reconstructions are tentative; for example, scholars have shown that trying to reconstruct
modern Cantonese from the rimes of modern Cantopop would give a very inaccurate picture of
its pronunciation.
The development of the spoken Chinese from early historical times to the present has been
complex. Most Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to
the southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence
of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the
mountains and rivers of southern China promoted linguistic diversity.
Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of
Chinese. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese
dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th
century, the Empire had set up orthoepyacademies (simplified Chinese: 正音书院; traditional
Chinese: 正音書院; pinyin: Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the Qing
capital Beijing's standard, but had little success. During the Qing's last 50 years in the late 19th
century, the Beijing Mandarin finally replaced Nanjing Mandarin in the imperial court. For the

4. 3
general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then,
a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also
continued to use their local languages for each and every aspect of life. The new Beijing
Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited.
This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong
and Macau) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Modern Standard
Chinese (Mandarin). As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all people in mainland
China and on Taiwan. At the time of the widespread introduction of Mandarin in mainland
China and Taiwan, Hong Kong was a British colony and Mandarin was never used at all.
In Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and sometimes Guangxi, the language of daily life, education,
formal speech and business remains in the local Cantonese. However, Mandarin is becoming
increasingly influential, which is seen as a threat by the locals, fearing that their native
language might face a decline leading to its death.
Influence of Chinese Language
The Chinese language has spread to neighboring countries through a variety of means.
Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han Empire in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of
a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. The Four
Commanders were established in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but disintegrated in
the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th
centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later Korea,
Japan, and Vietnam developed strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions,
with Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would
retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th
century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing,
using Literary Chinese.
Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own
tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with
these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and
Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx
led to change in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of
mosaic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean.
Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin
compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots

5. 4
in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These
coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between
languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to
loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different
compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged,
and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of
Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For
example, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment
magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.
Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially
based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the Hangul alphabet for Korean and
supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written
with the complex Chữ nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the
late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese
characters (Kanji) and kana. Korean is written exclusively with Hangul in North Korea, and
supplementary Chinese characters (Hanja) are increasingly rarely used in South Korea.
Vietnamese is written with a Latin-based alphabet.
Classification of Chinese Language
According to Jerry Norman, dialectologist estimated that there are hundreds of mutually
unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which
differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, although there
are also some sharp boundaries. However, the rate of change in mutual intelligibility varies
immensely depending on region. For instance, the varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three
northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the province of Fujian,
where Min varieties predominate, the speech of neighboring counties or even villages may be
mutually unintelligible.
Dialect Groups
Classifications of Chinese varieties in the late 19th century and early 20th century were based
on impressionistic criteria. They often followed river systems, which were historically the main
routes of migration and communication in southern China. The first scientific classifications,
based primarily on the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials, were produced by Wang
Li in 1936 and Li Fang-Kuei in 1937, with minor modifications by other linguists since. The

6. 5
conventionally accepted set of seven dialect groups first appeared in the second edition of Yuan
Jiahua's dialectology handbook in 1961.
Classification
Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely on the
basis of the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials:
 Mandarin
 Wu
 Gan
 Xiang
 Min
 Hakka
 Yue
 Jin
 Huizhou
 Pinghua
Figure 1: Range of Chinese dialect groups according to the Language Atlas of China

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Figure 2: Dialect users by percentage
Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect of northwestern Hainan,
Waxiang, spoken in a small strip of land in western Hunan, and Shaozhou Tuhua, spoken in the
border regions of Guangdong, Hunan, and Guangxi.
Phonology
The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus that has a vowel preceded by
an onset and followed by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone. There are some
instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable.
Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no
coda but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, the retroflex
approximant /ɻ /, and voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these
codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/, /ŋ/ and /ɻ /.
The number of sounds in the different spoken
dialects varies, but in general there has been a
tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle
Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have
experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so
have far more multisyllabic words than most other
spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in
Mandarin (66.2%)
Jin (5.2%)
Wu (6.1%)
Huizhou (0.3%)
Gan (4.0%)
Xiang (3.0%)
Min (6.2%)
Hakka (3.5%)
Yue (4.9%)
Pinghua, Others (0.6%)

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some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about
an eighth as many as English.
 Initials
In the 42 varieties surveyed in the Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects, the number of
initials (including a zero initial) ranges from 15 in some southern dialects to a high of 35 in the
dialect of Chongming Island, Shanghai.
Fuzhou (Min) Suzhou (Wu) Beijing (Mandarin)
Stops and
affricates
voiceless
unaspirated
p t ts k p t ts tɕ k p t ts tɕ tʂ k
voiceless
aspirated
pʰ tʰ tsʰ kʰ pʰ tʰ tsʰ tɕʰ kʰ pʰ tʰ tsʰ tɕʰ tʂʰ kʰ
voiced b d dʑ g
Fricatives voiceless s x f s ɕ h f s ɕ ʂ x
voiced v z ʑ ɦ
Nasals m n ŋ m n ȵ ŋ m n
Sonorants
l ∅
l
∅
l ɻ/ʐ
∅
Table-1: Initials of selected varieties
 Finals
Chinese finals may be analysed as an optional medial glide, a main vowel and an optional coda.
Conservative vowel systems, such as those of Gan dialects, have high vowels /i/, /u/ and /y/,
which also function as medials, mid vowels /e/ and /o/, and a low /a/-like vowel.[66] In other
dialects, including Mandarin dialects, /o/ has merged with /a/, leaving a single mid vowel with
a wide range of allophones. Many dialects, particularly in northern and central China, have
apical or retroflex vowels, which are syllabic fricatives derived from high vowels following
sibilant initials.[68] In many Wu dialects, vowels and final glides have monophthongized,
producing a rich inventory of vowels in open syllables. Reduction of medials is common in Yue
dialects.
The Middle Chinese codas, consisting of glides /j/ and /w/, nasals /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/, and
stops /p/, /t/ and /k/, are best preserved in southern dialects, particularly Yue dialects.[32] In
Jin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Wu dialects, the stops have merged as a final glottal stop,
while in most northern varieties they have disappeared. In Mandarin dialects final /m/ has
merged with /n/, while some central dialects have a single nasal coda, in some cases realized as
a nasalization of the vowel.

9. 8
 Tones
Almost all Chinese languages have a tonal system, which is used to differentiate homonyms.
Mandarin Chinese has four tones, but other Chinese languages have more. Yue (Cantonese), for
example, has 9 tones.
Figure 3: Different Tones of Chinese language
Evolution of Chinese Character
Chinese character is probably the world's oldest writings. Even before 3,000 years in the Shang
Dynasty, oracle bone inscription, a well-developed writing, has already existed in China. The
experts and scholars' investigation and study indicate that the pottery inscription etched in the
pottery wares which were unearthed in Yangshao Cultural Relic more than 6,000 years ago was
China's oldest writing. The following are the four important periods of Chinese writing: Jia-gu
wen (Oracle Bone - 1500 - 1000 A.C), Da Zhuan (Greater Seal - 1100 - 700 A.C), Xiao Zhuan
(Lesser Seal), and Lis Shu (Clerkly Script).
In ancient there was a very common myth named "Cang Jie's Invention of Characters". In
accordance with this myth, Cang Jie, a historical chronicler of the Yellow Emperor in excess of
5,000 years ago, was inspired by the footprints of animals and understood that various prints
could possibly be treated as marks to discriminate different objects, so he invented a great deal
of symbols to represent diverse objects and affairs, and they have been the oldest Chinese
characters. In the prolonged program of history, the Chinese characters had undergone many
times of evolution prior to they took the present type. Oracle bone inscription was a writing
carved in tortoise shells in the Shang Dynasty. Inscription on bronze, also known as bronze
ware script, was a variety of writing cast in the bells and tripods. Significant seal script
extensively used in several vassal states in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Period
was far more regular and symmetrical than bronze ware script in writing. Modest seal script
mā má mǎ mà

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was utilized in China after Emperor Qin Shi Huang's unification of complete China, and its
framework was simple, writing technique was changeless and character pattern was much
more orderly. Clerical writing was a kind of writing used in the Han Dynasty, which was
developed from the modest seal script. Typical script firstly appeared in the late Han Dynasty,
and it's been employed by the folks generation after generation to this day because it is really
far more straightforward and easy to be written than the clerical writing.
The oldest texts to have been discovered are oracular sayings incised on tortoise shells and
cattle scapulae by court diviners of the Shang dynasty, from the early 14th century BC on; these
are the so-called oracle-bone inscriptions. Although the writing system has since been
standardized and stylistically altered, its principles and many of its symbols remain
fundamentally the same. Like other scripts of ancient origin, Chinese is derived from picture
writing; it grew into a word-by-word representation of language when it was discovered that
words too abstract to be readily pictured could be indicated by their sound rather than their
sense. Unlike other scripts, however, Chinese still works pictographically as well as
phonetically. Moreover, its sound indications have not been adapted to changes of
pronunciation but have remained keyed to the pronunciation of 3000 years ago. The building
blocks of the system are several hundred pictographs for such basic words as man, horse, and
axe. In addition, expanded, or compound, pictographs exist.
Figure 4: Evolution of Chinese character

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For example, a symbol of this type representing man carrying grain means "harvest," and thus
"year" (nian).
Shi Huangdi, first emperor of a unified China, suppressed many regional scripts and enforced a
simplified, standardized writing called the Small Seal. In the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) this
developed into the Clerical, Running, Draft, and Regular or Standard scripts. Printed Chinese is
modeled on the Standard Script. Cursive or Running or rapid writing (the Running and Draft
scripts) introduced many abbreviated characters used in artistic calligraphy and in commercial
and private correspondence, but it was long banned from official documents. The non-
abbreviated characters is referred to as the "traditional" characters. The abbreviated
characters is sometimes referred to as the "simplified" characters. The first modern series of
simplified characters (jiantizi) was introduced in 1956 by the government of the People’s
Republic of China in an effort to promote literacy. This was followed by a second series of
simplified characters in 1964. In total, 2235 characters were simplified. The simplified
characters are officially used in the People’s Republic of China, except for Hong Kong, Macao
and Taiwan, where the ‘traditional’ characters (fantizi) are still used.
Main 4 Principles of character construction
 Pictographs: Represent real real-life objects by drawings ( (≈≈4%)
– Animal, plants, parts of the body etc.
– Example (Scripts from oracle bone)
Examples: Horse ⻢, Human 人, Sun 日, Mountain 山, Big, great 大, Hand 手, Knife 刀
 Ideographs: Represent positional and numeral concepts by indication ( (≈≈1%)
Examples: 一二 , , , Heaven天, Separate 分
 Logical Aggregates: Form a new meaning by combining the meanings of two or more
characters ( ≈≈13%)
Examples:
Wood 木 Small Forest 林 Big Forest 森
Person 人 Small Group 从 Large Group 众
手+ 分+ 手 ＝掰Hand + To separate + Hand ＝To separate sth with two hands
 Phonetic Complexes: Form a character by combining the meaning of one character and
the pronunciation of another character ( ≈≈82%)

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Examples:
江 河 湖 海 流 沐 潮
椅 杆 杨 桐 案 架 梨
妈 码 玛 骂 蚂 吗 犸
Methods of Transliteration
In the English-speaking world, since 1892, Chinese words (except personal and place-names)
have usually been transliterated according to a phonetic spelling system called Wade-Giles
romanization, propounded by Sir Thomas Wade (1818-95) and Herbert Giles (1845-1935).
Personal names were romanized according to individual wishes, however, and place-names
followed the nonsystematic spellings of the Chinese Post Office. Since 1958 another phonetic
romanization known as Pinyin ("spelling") has had official standing in the People's Republic of
China, where it is used for telegrams and in primary education. Replacement of the traditional
characters by Pinyin has been advocated but is unlikely to be carried through completely
because of the threat it poses to literature and historical documentation in the classical
language. Simplification of the sound system through time, with the resultant homonyms, has
made the terse classical style unintelligible when transcribed in an alphabetic script. Since Jan.
1, 1979, Xinhua (New China News Agency) has used Pinyin in all dispatches to foreign
countries. The U. S. government, many scholarly publications, and newspapers such as the New
York Times have also adopted the Pinyin system, as has the Funk & Wagnall's New
Encyclopedia.
Number of Chinese characters
In total, throughout Chinese history, more than 80,000 characters have been identified, of
which about 11,000 are still used in Modern Chinese. However, only about 3,500 are commonly
used. In fact, with only 1,500 characters, you could read 94.6% of written material. Knowing
3,000 characters allows you to read no less than 99.5% of all texts and is thus definitely enough
to read.
Grammar of the Chinese language
Compared to Western languages, the structure of the Chinese language has a very strong
internal logic and very few exceptions to certain rules, compared to English, French, German or
Spanish.
• Verbs: no conjugations and no tenses, only some particles used after verbs
• Nouns: no articles, no declinations, no gender, no cases, no plural
• Sentence structure: fixed word-order in both affirmative sentences and questions, no
inversion

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Importance of Chinese language
The importance of Chinese stands out as the most spoken language in the world with over an
estimated billion people in China and various other parts of the word speaking it. One can
easily assume this makes Chinese one of the most important languages on the planet. China as a
country is growing by leaps and bounds as a world power and shows to the sign of slowing
down.
Chinese language is one of the six official languages used by United Nations (UN). Chinese now
has earned itself greater status in the World.
Figure: Official Languages of the United Nations (UN)
Chinese has more native speakers than any other language, followed by Hindi and Urdu, which
have the same linguistic origins in northern India. English comes next with 527 million native
speakers. Arabic is used by nearly 100 million more native speakers than Spanish. The
numbers are fascinating because they reflect the fact that two-thirds of the world's population
share only 12 native languages.
Figure 6: Some of the languages with most native speakers

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Recent studies have shown that Chinese has become a popular choice for a second language
among college students. Surpassing previous favorite that include Spanish, French, and German
languages. This increasing popularity isn’t surprising since the growing appeal of Chinese
culture in the west and worldwide.
Like many other languages around the world, Chinese as a great deal of dialects, the most
common Chinese dialect is Mandarin Chinese. Even though English happens to be popular
throughout China, most Chinese people tend not to understand English very well, so learning
some Chinese is important knowledge to have.
Another online studies showed that, by searching internet Chinese language (771 million
users) held at the second position of where English is the highest one (985 million users)
followed by English language.
Figure 7: Internet world users by language
Why Chinese Language is time demanding?
Learning Chinese offers many benefits to personal and professional growth not least gaining a
better understanding of one of the richest cultures in the world. Millions of people travel to
China to see the shrines, walk The Great Wall, historical places of China and indulge in the
wonderful food markets in cities such as Beijing. Here I am trying to describe some important
facts.

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 China is the most widely spoken language in the world
Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world with approximately
1,197,000,000 people speaking Chinese, of which 873,000 million speak Mandarin.
Therefore 14% of the global population speaking Chinese.
 Tourism
Before China’s reform in the 1970s, China was a isolated country that didn’t accept any
tourism. After 1970, China has become one of the leading tourist destinations. The Great
Wall of China might be one of the most travelled to places on Earth but other wonders
of China include the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Terracotta Army in the Qin Empire
Emperor’s Mausoleum, the Yangtze River, and the Potala Palace. Even if you’re just a
casual traveler, learning some Chinese to understand street signs, order food, or just
communicating with people you meet on street, a most pleasant and enjoyable
experience.
 International Business
Chinese is becoming one of the most important languages when it comes to operating
an international business. The Chinese market is the biggest growing market even in
this economic downturn. Expertise in Chinese has grown increasingly important to the
overall global economy and many business owners are looking to break into this
international market. Any business in the twenty-first century will be trying to do
business in China and in doing so will required Chinese speakers to negotiate
agreements and develop these trade deals. Economist predict by 2020, China will
without doubt surpass the United States as the biggest international superpower.
 To know the Ancient History
Chinese history and culture is one the richest and certainly the oldest in the world.
China is renowned for producing beautiful novels, short stories, poetry and more
recently excellence in film. Reading great Chinese biographies and watching short films
about the history of China provides a greater understanding of the language.
All languages evolve with time and Chinese is no exception. To indisputably understand the
importance of Chinese language you have to learn the actual language yourself to help you
receive the full benefit of this amazing language later.

16. 15
Comparison Chinese Language with my Mother Language, Bangla
Bangla, being a member of the Indo-Aryan languages, is derived from Sanskrit, and hence
appears to be similar to Hindi. It is written left-to-right, top-to-bottom of page (same as
English). Vocabulary is akin to Sanskrit, and whilst it is quite difficult at first.
Bangla vocabulary shows many influences. In Bangladesh there is obviously a strong Perso-
Arabic influence due to Islam. This is seen in the greetings of "Salaam aleykum" (Peace be unto
you) and the reply "Wa aleykum as-salaam" (Unto you also peace) whereas in Chinese language
it is said to be Ni Hao! On the other hand, at the end of something it is said to be "Khoda hafez"
but in Chinese it is “Zaijian”. I think there are some similarities in different languages as some
of them are mentioned here in case of Bangla and Chinese words like Ma (In Chinese Mama),
Baba (In Chinese Baba), Didi (Bangla meaning is elder sister and in Chinese- younger brother),
Shui Jiao (in Chinese meaning is go to bed similar with Bangla) etc.
In Bangla language there are 11 vowels with seven sounds - long and short sound and 39
consonant sound. In total 50 letters are available in Bangla language. All Bangla vowels can be
nasalised by using the nasal sign called "chondrobindu" (meaning moon dot). All Bangla vowels
in the initial position of a word retain their original shape (see table below to see the
traditional arrangement of Bangla vowels). However, with the exception of the first vowel ("a")
which has no signature and is always implicit in the consonant, they all change their shape
when used with a consonant. The new shape, a signature (known in Bangla as a "kar"), then
might proceed, come after, be around or at the bottom of the consonant. As to consonants
Bangla includes 39 characters. However, these 39 characters number no more than 29 sounds.
In case of Chinese language there are almost 80, 000 characters with 4 tones, 21 initials, 35
finals and different syllables.
Figure 8: Alphabet Vowel Chart in Bangla Language

17. 16
Figure 9: Alphabet Consonant Chart in Bangla Language
My view’s about Chinese Language
To study Chinese I would like to mention here three main challenges.
 The Chinese Characters
 Pronounce 4 tones appropriately
 Chinese vocabulary
However, once we start to learn Chinese, we will discover the radical-phonetic system of the
characters, making it easier to memorize them. The pronunciation of the 4 tones will come
naturally as long as our pay attention to it, listen to Chinese people speaking and train our self.
As for the Chinese vocabulary, it’s very important to speak as much as possible. When using the
same words every day and associating them with concrete objects or situations, we will make
sure that those ‘strange’ sounds gradually become very familiar to us.

18. 17
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