Chinese Characters

Chinese Characters

                                                        
In China, just like the English alphabet, People use Chinese character for communication. The Chinese character is very important for East Asian.  Today, I am going to talk about the history, structure, influence, and the current issue of Chinese characters.
Speech goal: Arise people's interest in Asian culture.

According to the tradition, Cang Jie invented the first Chinese character of the time of the Yellow Emperor thousands of years ago. He observed the footprint of the animals and realized how just the shape of the footprint identified the animal. And those kinds of Chinese characters are called Pictograms, although they only make up a small portion of Chinese characters. Over time, they had been simplified, to make them easier to read.
There are other kinds of Chinese character, like simple ideograms, compound ideograms, rebus, and Phono-semantic compounds, Transformed cognates.

The Chinese character is born in China, but they also have a great influence on Japan and Korea.
Chinese characters, which is called Kanji in Japanese is one part of the Japanese writing system. People have to understand about 2000 Kanji for daily life. Kana, the original Japanese characters also came from Chinese characters around 2000 years ago.

At the beginning of the 20 century, Japanese people needed new words to translate concepts from Europe. So, they borrow Chinese characters to compose new words for translating the concepts from Europe.

As for Korea, Chinese characters which are called Hanja in Korean were the only official characters in Korea, until Sejong the Great invented Hangul, the Korean characters in 1446. Nowadays, Korean people are almost using only hangul instead of Chinese characters. However, there are still many words originally came from Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are so important for the East Asian countries. However, with the development of new technology, there is a big issue of it.

Nowadays the ability of Chinese people to write Chinese characters had decreased due to using a cell phone and computer, especially the young generation. Many young generations cannot even write Chinese characters nicely. Chinese characters are a great treasure of Chinese people and it is also very important for East Asia.

Junjie Li (Curtis)