Chapter 5–
Some Basic Language Skills Required for Learning Chinese

When it comes to learning the basics of the Chinese language, the biggest obstacles that people will face are as follows:

1. How to write, as well as recognize the characters which make up the Chinese language.

2. How to pronounce the characters correctly.
3. What each character means.
4. How to find each character.

However, because there have been advancements in relation to the technology used for producing Chinese software, this now makes it not only easy for a person to learn the language, but also makes it a lot of fun as well.

In this article, we will be taking a closer look at the Chinese characters.

There are well over 80,000 Chinese characters to be found in the Chinese language, but a lot of these are very rarely used today. In fact, in order to have the basic foundations for being able to read and write in Chinese, a person will only need a few thousand of these characters.

However, what you will soon discover is, that for every English word, in order for it to be translated into Chinese, they will use two or more characters. Each character should be used together, and then read from left to right.

So in order for you to master this language, you really need to learn everything with regard to the Chinese characters.

There are a number of different styles of Chinese writing, and some styles are, in fact, more ancient than others. What also should be noted is that, as well as different styles, there are differences in the way in which these styles are written.

So each Chinese character, no matter what style of writing is being used, will be used according to its purpose within the written text.

As well as the different styles, there are 2 forms of Chinese characters which are being used. These are Simplified and Traditional.

Simplified is the form of writing which is now used in mainland China, while the more traditional form of writing can be found being used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Within the simplified writing there are a total of 2,235 characters, and this results in the Chinese characters being the same but just in 2 different forms.

However, the actual number of commonly used Chinese characters being used today is around 3,500. Most of the Chinese characters you will see on many sites today will use the simplified form.