Are You Aware of The Key Features Of Chinese? Go through this

Chinese in the field of linguistics is classified as a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. Despite sharing some similar written characters, it is unrelated to Korean or Japanese, contrary to popular belief.

Falling under the cover of Chinese course in Shanghai, there are in fact many different language dialects. The official dialect and the one talked about in this article is Mandarin Chinese.

Due to its origin in the Beijing region, Mandarin is the dominant dialect. This has become the centre of economic and political power in China.

Some of the key elements of this fascinating language are:

No Form Change in Chinese Characters

No matter what they are used for the characters always stay in the same form, which another important feature of Chinese. There are no spelling changes or conjugations.

Depending on the context in which they’re used this is in contrast to European languages where adjectives and verbs can change.


                                                                

For beginners, this is great news as is the case in many other languages you won’t have to remember verb tenses.

Time adverbs are used to indicate the verb tenses in Chinese.

Chinese Homonyms

As taught in the Chinese language school in Shanghai numerous homonyms present in the writing system are another unique feature of Chinese.

These characters are written differently but pronounced the same way. Significantly, a different meaning is possessed by them.

Even in English, Homonyms are although quite normal but in Chinese homonyms are even more common.


                                                     

Tones in Chinese

Of the Chinese dialects and its language tones is another unique feature. Since they do not exist in English, for a native English speaker to get used to they can be difficult.

Chinese tones are similar to pitches in music and are changes in the pitch of a vowel. They can stay flat, rise and fall or go up or down.

Word Order in Chinese

As it shares many similarities with the English language for English speakers Chinese grammar is extremely simple. While you learn Mandarin in Shanghai you will know that the basic sentence structure in English is similar to that in Chinese.