Is it worthwhile to learn Chinese?
Chinese is a language spoken by more than 1.2 billion people worldwide. The earliest written documents in China are Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions, which date back to 1250 BCE. Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, was adopted in the 1930s and is now an official language of both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of Singapore’s four official languages and one of the United Nations’ six official languages. Literate speakers of incomprehensible languages share the written form, which employs the logograms known as Chinese characters. Since the 1950s, the government of the People’s Republic of China has encouraged the use of simplified Chinese characters, while traditional characters continue to be used in Taiwan, Singapore, and other nations with substantial Chinese-speaking populations, such as Malaysia.



