Is the Chinese writing system a sufficient reason on its own to guarantee that Mandarin will not become a global language like English? That’s what someone asked me after I discussed the prima facie ...

BBC's Celia Hatton reports from Beijing, and asks whether the Chinese are forgetting how to write their own language. In China, it takes blood, sweat and months of studying dictionaries to become a ...

Of the approximately 200 countries in the world today, China and Japan are the only two that still use the Chinese writing system, known as kanji in Japanese. According to the Kojiki and Nihonshoki, ...

A student takes part in a calligraphy competition in Jiashan county, Zhejiang province, in August. Ten of the 50 participants will go to Jiaxing for a follow-up competition. Hu Lingxiang / for China ...

Few languages are so associated with their written form as is Chinese. The mere mention of the language calls to mind an elaborate, beautiful and—to outsiders—mysterious script. The Chinese themselves ...

Language is the soul of cultural expression. For a multilingual writer, the most fundamental decision is about which language to write in. Many non-native speakers of English are drawn to it for its ...

“Yi, er, san . . .” A Chinese language student counts each stroke while writing the Chinese character for “big”, 大. This seems like a simple process, but new evidence suggests that studying Chinese ...