and intonation.
The Reading Exercises are presented twice: first in simplified characters in horizontal format, and then again in traditional characters in vertical format.5 This is done to provide learners with practice in reading both types of characters and both formats. Of course, learners may choose to read only one version of the Reading Exercises, or they may read one version first and the other version several months later.
The Reading Exercises for Units 1 to 10 consist of the following components:
1. Sentences. These illustrate the use of the new characters and words in context. There are always ten sentences in this section, and they exemplify all the new characters and most of the new words of the lesson.
2. Conversations. The conversations are in spoken style. The name or role of each person speaking is included and should be studied along with the conversation itself. During class or practice sessions, you should find a partner or partners, and each of you should take a role. Then switch roles, so you get practice reading all of the lines.
3. Character Differentiation Drills. In the same way that drills can be useful for teaching spoken language, they can also help teach written language. The purpose of the character differentiation drills is to give you practice in differentiating “look-alike” characters that learners new to Chinese might confuse. Pronounce each drill out loud and think of the meaning of the character you’re pronouncing.
4. Narratives. The purpose of the narratives is to give you practice in reading connected prose, which is different in a number of ways from a series of independent sentences. A few of the narratives include some elements of written-style Chinese. The first time you read a narrative, you should read it out loud; the second time, read silently and try gradually to increase your reading speed. Always think of the meaning of what you’re reading.
5. Notes. These are miscellaneous comments to help you understand the meaning, structure, and cultural background of the material in the Reading Exercises. No attempt is made to provide systematic treatment of grammar, since that is provided in Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening.
Some of the lessons include additional sections on special topics such as numbers, personal and place names, money, times, and dates. There are also a total of 18 supplements presenting examples of popular culture and realia ranging from tongue twisters and riddles to tables and handwritten notes.
An Overview of the Chinese Writing System
Most people equate the Chinese writing system with Chinese characters. Characters are certainly the most prominent feature of written Chinese, but the Chinese writing system actually consists of a whole lot more. In addition to simplified characters, traditional characters, and unofficial but often encountered alternate characters, the Chinese writing system also includes the uppercase and lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet (as in X光 “X-ray,” B型肝炎 “Hepatitis B,” 卡拉OK “Karaoke,” and e世代 “digital generation”); the Pinyin romanization system (for computer entry or to indicate the pronunciations of rare characters); the Arabic numbers plus the Chinese symbol 〇; mathematical symbols such as +–× ÷ = and %; the Chinese currency sign ¥; the reduplication sign 々; punctuation; use of smaller characters for humility; and spacing conventions. Of course, as an educated reader and writer of English, you already know some of the preceding, so not everything will be new for you.
Chinese characters are variously termed “ideograms,” “ideographs,” “logographs,” or “graphs.” In this book, we shall simply call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters.” It’s important to keep in mind that, as is true of all languages, in Chinese speech is primary, the standard Chinese writing system of today essentially being a set of written symbols for recording Chinese speech; Chinese characters certainly do not, as claimed by some, constitute a “language-independent system of logical symbols.” It’s best to think of a Chinese character as standing for a meaningful syllable of a spoken word, a little as if in English we had one symbol for “auto,” another for “bio,” and yet another for “graph,” so that we could then put them together in different combinations like “autograph,” “biography,” and “autobiographer.”
ORIGIN OF THE CHARACTERS
Until quite recently, Chinese children were taught in school that the Chinese characters were the invention of one man, Cang Jie, an official in the court of the Yellow Emperor around 2600 BCE. According to one version of this legend, Cang Jie got the idea for characters from the tracks which he saw birds and other animals make in the ground. However, scholars today agree that Chinese characters are not the invention of any one person but are rather the cumulative product of many individuals over a long period of time. The characters are quite clearly pictographic in origin. The prototypes for the characters are simple drawings of animals and other natural objects which can be found etched on fragments of ancient pottery dating back to before 2000 BCE. Recently, there have been reports of thousands of pictorial symbols dating back even earlier that have been found carved on cliff faces in northwest China.
The earliest examples of fully developed Chinese writing we have today are the so-called 甲骨文 Jiăgŭwén or oracle bone inscriptions, dating from the late Shang Dynasty (ca. 1300 BCE). To divine the future for the Shang rulers, priests would hold ox collar bones and tortoise shells over a fire until they developed cracks and then interpret the meanings of the cracks, making predictions about weather, religion, politics, and war. The interpretations and predictions would then be recorded on the bones and shells in a few lines of text written in the characters of the day (see the photos on this page and page 15). Over 100,000 pieces of Jiăgŭwén are extant, containing over 3,000 different characters, roughly half of which can be read today.
Oracle bone
The story of the discovery of the Jiăgŭwén is a colorful chapter in the history of Chinese paleography. The oracle bones, which had been discovered in the vicinity of Anyang, Henan, had for some time been regarded as “dragon bones” and had been sold and ground up for Chinese medicine in pharmacies in the Beijing area. In 1899, a scholar by the name of Wang Yirong, who was taking the dragon bones for malaria, examined the characters on the bones and started researching them with his friend Liu E. They concluded that the inscriptions on the bones were older than any other characters known at the time. Wang died the next year, but Liu published a book on his and Wang’s collection of bones in 1903, which made their discovery known to the world.
Both the forms of the characters and the total number of characters multiplied greatly during the succeeding Zhou Dynasty (11th century to 221 BCE), differing widely from place to place. The characters from this period, most extant specimens of which are inscribed on various kinds of bronze vessels, are collectively known as 大篆 Dàzhuàn or Great Seal Script.
In 221 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, unified the country and made mandatory throughout all of China the use of the Qin script. This script, known as 小篆 Xiăozhuàn or Small Seal Script, is ancestral to all later forms of Chinese writing and is still sometimes used today for ornamental purposes and in the making of seals. At about the same time as the official Xiăozhuàn script, there developed among the common people a much simplified form of Xiăozhuàn called 隶书 ( 隸書 ) Lìshū or Clerical Script, which was characterized by a straightening out of round strokes and a generally much less pictographic appearance. By the latter part of the Han Dynasty (ca. 200 CE), Lìshū had been further simplified into 楷书 ( 楷書 ) Kăishū or Standard Script, which has served ever since as the standard for both printed and carefully handwritten characters.
The table below summarizes the development of two characters from their Jiăgŭwén to their Kăishū forms (but keep in