Chinese people needed to write down pronunciations in dictionaries. Chinese does not have an alphabet, so how to write down sounds was a big problem in the beginning. Nowadays the Mandarin language uses Hanyu Pinyin to represent the sounds in Roman letters.
All the Chinese languages (or dialects) use tones. This means that they use high and low pitches to help make differences in meaning clear.
The Chinese language is like a big tree. The base of the tree started thousands of years ago. It now has several main limbs. Some people call "just a branch" what other people call a main limb, so you can say there are six or seven main limbs. Each of these main limbs splits off into branches about the way there are branches of English spoken in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, India, and so forth. Just as the Romance languages all come from the area around Rome and are based on Latin, the Chinese languages all have some common source, so they keep many common things among them.
Here are the main seven main groups of languages/dialects of Chinese by size:
In 1956, the government of the People's Republic of China made public a set of simplified Chinese characters to make learning, reading and writing the Chinese language easier. In Mainland China and Singapore, people use these simpler characters. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places where they speak Chinese, people still use the more traditional characters. The Korean language also uses Chinese characters to represent certain words. The Japanese language uses them even more often. These characters are known in Korean as Hanja and in Japanese as Kanji.
A Chinese person with a good education today knows 6,000-7,000 characters. About 3,000 Chinese characters are needed to read a Mainland newspaper. However, people who have learned only the 400 most frequently used characters can read a newspaper—but they will have to guess some less-used words.
Here are some samples of some words and sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Simplified Characters are on the left, and Traditional characters are on the right. The pronunciation is given in the pinyin system, which may not always be as simple as it looks for those who have not studied it.
The Traditional Characters are now used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chinese from Mainland China uses the Simplified Characters, but may recognize Traditional Characters.
Before 1956, Chinese was written using only Traditional Characters. At that time most Chinese people could not read or write at all. The government of the People's Republic of China thought that the Traditional characters were very hard to understand. They also thought that if they made the characters simpler more people could learn how to read and write. Today, many people in China can read and write with the new Simplified Characters.
Zero
Zero (0) is a special number. If there are zero things, then there is nothing at all. For example, if a person has zero hats, that means they do not have any hats.
The symbol for the number zero is "0". It is the additive identity of common numbers. This means that if a number is added to 0, then that number would remain unchanged.
3 + 0 = 3
3 − 0 = 3
0 − 3 = −3
43 × 0 = 0
0 ÷ 43 = 0
43 ÷ 0 has an undefined answer.
0 ÷ 0 has no answer.
The following table includes all of the above examples along with other operations in a condensed, generalized form (where "x" represents any number).
The idea of zero was first thought about in Babylon, India and in Central America at different times. Some places and countries did not know about zero, which may have made it harder for those people to do mathematics. For example, the year after 1 BC is AD 1 (there is no year zero). In India, zero was theorized in the seventh century by the mathematician Brahmagupta.
Over hundreds of years, the idea of zero was passed from country to country, from India and Babylon to other places, like Greece, Persia and the Arab world. The Europeans learned about zero from the Arabs, and stopped using Roman math. This is why numbers are called "Arabic numerals".
Zero is almost never used as a place number (ordinal number). This means that it is not used like 1, 2, or 3 to indicate the order, or place, of something, like 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. An exception to this is seen in many programming languages.
Some other things about zero:
Any number divided by itself equals one, except if that number is zero. In symbols:
0 ÷ 0 = "not a number."
In time, zero means "now". For example, when a person is counting down the time to the start of something, such as a foot race or when a rocket takes off, the count is: "three, two, one, zero (or "go")". Zero is the exact time of the start of the race or when the rocket takes off into the sky.
0 is the integer that precedes the positive 1, and follows −1. In most (if not all) numerical systems, 0 was identified before the idea of 'negative integers' was accepted. It means "courageous one" in hieroglyphics.
Zero is a number which means an amount of null size; that is, if the number of brothers is zero, that means the same thing as having no brothers, and if something has a weight of zero, it has no weight. If the difference between the numbers of pieces in two piles is zero, it means the two piles have an equal number of pieces. Before counting starts, the result can be assumed to be zero; that is the number of items counted before one counts the first item, and counting the first item brings the result to one. And if there are no items to be counted, zero remains the final result.
While mathematicians all accept zero as a number, some non-mathematicians would say that zero is not a number, arguing that one cannot have zero of something. Others say that if one has a bank balance of zero, one has a specific quantity of money in that account, namely none. It is that latter view which is accepted by mathematicians and most others.
Normally speaking, there was no year zero between 1 BC and 1 AD. More specifically, almost all historians leave out the year zero from the proleptic Gregorian and Julian calendars (that is, from the normal calendar used in English-speaking countries), but astronomers include it in these same calendars. However, the phrase Year Zero may be used to describe any event considered so important, that someone might want to start counting years all over again from zero.
The modern numeral 0 is normally written as a circle or (rounded) rectangle. In old-style fonts with text figures, 0 is usually the same height as a lowercase x.
On the seven-segment displays of calculators, watches, etc., 0 is usually written with six line segments, though on some historical calculator models, it was written with four line segments. The four-segment 0 is not common.
The "number" zero (as in the "zero brothers" example above) is not the same as the "numeral" or "digit" zero, used in numeral systems using positional notation. Successive positions of digits have higher values, so the digit zero is used to skip a position and give appropriate value to the preceding and following digits. A zero digit is not always necessary in a different positional number system. Something called bijective numeration is a possible example of a system without zeroes.
0 (zero) is also used as a numerical digit used to represent that number in numerals. It is used to hold the place of that digit, because correct placing of digits affects a numeral's value.
Examples:
The number 0 and the letter O are both round, though of different widths. The difference is important on a computer. For one thing, a computer will not do arithmetic with the letter O, because it does not know that it should have been a zero.