The eradication of illiteracy in China began around 1949. Until then, only 20% of the population were literate - reading and writing. The introduction of compulsory secondary education (grades 9) covered more than 90% of Chinese people. Currently, approximately half of the country's population speaks the regulatory (state) Chinese language.
Instruction manual
1
Literacy is a huge achievement of the Ministry of Education of China. Indeed, in the country in parallel there are many dialects (separate languages) inherent in different provinces. Representatives of individual nationalities do not understand each other’s speech at all, but can quite be explained using hieroglyphs. They (graphic symbols) are the connecting thread among the placers of beads of the Chinese people. That is why not one of the attempts to introduce the alphabet in China was successful.
2
Hieroglyphic writing has deep roots and is dear to the heart of every Chinese who honors centuries-old cultural traditions. The art of calligraphy has always been considered the highest in China. Since ancient times, the development of literacy has been practically the only way of social growth and mobility. No wonder an educated person in China is called a "teacher", not a "master."
3
Tutonghua is a modern Chinese language that emerged from the Beijing dialect. Thanks to television, the media and the education system, it is owned by about a billion people. Writing in a bar from top to bottom is read from right to left. Today it is difficult to name the exact number of existing characters. According to some reports, there are about 60 thousand, but the most common ones are not more than a thousand. It is this thousand basic designations that are part of more complex concepts.
4
An educated Chinese must master six types of characters. Graphic signs are prototypes of simple ancient pictograms (sun, rain, water, etc.). Index signs are symbols roughly resembling the concepts they describe (down, up). Synthetic signs - options for merging the signs of the first two categories. For example, the word “wagon” is part of such concepts as “tank”, “bus”, “train”, etc.
Phonetic signs are key words that unite a group of concepts that are part of more complex meanings and have 4 tonal positions that radically change the meaning. For example, in the first key, the word means - thick, and in the third - a robber. The fifth type - modified characters of the first 4 types. The sixth type is borrowed characters describing new concepts.
5
To read newspapers and recognize the most straightforward text, you need to remember about 2-3 thousand characters. In colloquial speech, the average Chinese uses 4-6 thousand. Philologists hold in their memory no more than 10 thousand characters.
