Response Apr.14

Elizabeth Hill talks much about the writing literacy like photograph and so on. However, originally, they are all defined as “writing”. In this sense, I would like to talk about writing literacy in my own country----china.
As we know, the Chinese writing system is one of the oldest known written languages. According to some research, some of the earliest examples of ancient Chinese writing date back to 4,000 years ago. China is such a enormous country that it owns many different kinds of language. They are two main languages, which are Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese together with numerous dialects. Although the spoken languages vary from region to region, all Chinese write the same word. The Chinese writing was the one unifying element that brought all these languages into one standard written language. For instance, while the pronunciation of the word “one” may vary from Mandarin to Cantonese, the written character is the same. Spoken Chinese has changed remarkably over the centuries, while Chinese writing has changed little from the ancient Chinese. There are four distinct periods of Chinese writing---Oracle Bone, Greater Seal, Lesser Seal, Clerkly Script.
Traditionally, the Chinese characters are written in columns. These columns are read from top to bottom and from right to left. Because this writing system uses a single character to represent a word or phrase, there are literally thousands of symbols. This enormous amount of characters accounts, in pat, for the high illiteracy rate in China. In an effort to circumvent this problem, the People’s Republic of China introduced a program to simplify the language into a set of commonly used characters. The current writing system we use today just contains approximately 6,000 of these characters.
Current Chinese writing includes two main methods, one is classical Chinese symbols, which we learn in Chinese class and we are supposed to recite them as well. The other is baihua method which includes vernacular Chinese symbols and is what we use in our daily lives.