In this article, I’m going to show you certain aspects of the Chinese language and explain why they make learning the language a lot easier than you might think.

No verb conjugations (变化)

When you learn English, you need to remember how the verb changes with the subject and time. In Chinese, there are no verb inflections (词尾的屈折变化) at all. 【小题1】.

No grammatical cases

In English, we make a difference between how pronouns are used depending on if they are the subject or the object of a sentence. 【小题2】. None of that in Chinese!

Flexible parts of speech

When learning English, you need to remember different forms of the words depending on what part of speech they belong to. For example, we say “ice” (noun), “icy” (adjective) and “to ice” (verb). These look different. 【小题3】. You don’t know which one it is unless you know the context. This means that speaking and writing becomes much easier since you don’t need to remember so many different forms!

【小题4】

Word order in Chinese can be a little bit tricky, but it becomes much easier at more advanced levels. As a beginner, there are a few patterns you need to learn, and once you’ve done that, you can just fill in the words you’ve learnt and people will be able to understand. It also helps that the basic word order is the same as in English: subject—verb—object.

What all these boil down to is that learning Chinese needn’t be all that hard. Yes, reaching an advanced level takes a lot of time and effort. 【小题5】

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the headache of communicating in a different language?

In a recent Wall Street journal article, technology policy expert A lec Ross argued that, within a decade or so. We’ll be able to communicate with one another via small earpieces with built-in microphones. That’s because technological progress is extremely rapid. It’s only a matter of time. Indeed, some parents are so convinced that this technology is imminent that they’re wondering if their kids should even learn a second language.

It’s true that an increase in the quantity and accuracy (准确) of the data loaded into computers make them cleverer at translating “No es bueno dormir mucho” as “It’s not good to sleep too much.” Replacing a word with its equivalent (同义词) in the target language is actually the “easy part of a translator’s job”. But even this seems to be a discouraging task for computers.

It’s so difficult for computers because translation doesn’t—or shouldn’t—involve simply translating words, sentences or paragraphs. Rather, it’s about translating meaning. And in order to infer meaning from a specific expression, humans have to interpret a mass of information at the same time. Think about all the related clues that go into understanding an expression: volume, gesture, situation, and even your culture. All are likely to convey as much meaning as the words you use.

Therefore, we should doubt whether a machine is able to translate the world around us. If people from different cultures can offend each other without realizing it, how can we expect a machine to do better? Unless engineers actually find a way to breathe a soul into a computer, undoubtedly when it comes to conveying and translation meaning using a natural language, a machine will never fully take our place.

UN Chinese Language Day is celebrated annually on April 20. The event was set up by the UN Department of Public Information in order to get equal use of all six of its official working language throughout the organization.

The first Chinese Language Day was celebrated in 2010 on the12th of November. But since 2011, the date has been the 20th of April. It’s because Chinese Guyu, which is the 6th of 24 solar terms in the traditional Chinese calendar, usually just begins around the date, April 20. Guyu is important to Chinese people. Each year they will celebrate Guyu in memory of the person: Cangjie, who was believed to create Chinese characters. There’s a story that when Cangjie created Chinese characters, it rained millet(粟)；Guyu in some way means “rain of millet”.

The Chinese Language Day for 2021 is especially to help people learn about Chinese characters based on symbols. In the building of the UN in New York, three events, which were organized by an organization connected to the UN, focused on three types of Chinese characters based on symbols. The three events were, a guided tour of the Liangzhu Museum, a language class on Dongba words, and a lecture on the history of Chinese characters. The three events were held from April 19 to 21, 2021.

Chinese was allowed to be an official language of the United Nations in 1946. However, in the early years, Chinese was not commonly used in the work of the United Nations. The situation improved after the restoration (恢复) of the lawful rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations in 1971. And in 1973, the General Assembly(联合国大会) included Chinese as a working language. Then more and more UN offices and work members work with the Chinese language.