Like the Romance languages, the Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible (that is what makes them different languages). But, because they share a common history and a good deal of common ...

Chinese, the most commonly spoken language in the world, is challenging to master. Rather than an alphabet, Chinese has thousands of characters. On top of that, the language is tonal, so how you ...

Faced with technological and political upheaval, reformers decided that Chinese would need to change in order to survive. Ian Buruma on Jing Tsu’s “Kingdom of Characters.” ...

The western alphabet and spelling is used to pronounce Chinese words. This transliteration of most of the languages into the pinyin system happened since the 1890s.

According to Livaccari, the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages just released a report that suggests Chinese to be the fastest-growing language, with a growth rate of 195 percent. To ...