In my (very biased) opinion, Chinese is one of the coolest languages. Today I'm going to go on a very long ramble of different parts of the Chinese written language that I think are very, very interesting. It might appear to be really strange to English speakers, especially since Chinese is, grammatically, very simple. In some ways, this makes it more difficult for me to grasp it fully, because I always try to force English grammar into Chinese phrases, which turns out sounding strange and wonky, and I always forget how more complex sentences are supposed to be structured.

A distinction that should be made: "Chinese" can refer to either the people or the written language. If you're trying to talk about the spoken language, then "Mandarin" is the common tongue (and the official language) of China, though there are definitely a large number of dialects as well.

Before I get started, I just wanted to share a really interesting historical tidbit about the written language. As you all know, Chinese is made up of characters, with each character representing a word. (Each character is one syllable.) Sometimes, two characters can be joined together to form a different word, which is very common. And though the characters might look really complex at first glance, the history of the language is really cool. Here's a picture of the evolution of Chinese script!

The two scripts that are used today are the standard (traditional) script, which is used largely in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan, and the modern simplified script, which is used in mainland China. Modern simplified script has only been around since the beginning of the 20th century, so it's very recent. But what I wanted you guys to see is how the very first column, oracle bone script, is essentially comprised of fairly accurate pictures. (I mean, look at the fish. ) And as you go from column to column, you can see it shifting and shaping into the more structured characters we see today. (Running script and cursive script are essentially less precise versions of the standard script, to save time when writing quickly.)

Onto grammar!

Let's start with the greeting "hello" that everyone knows: 你好 (nǐ hǎo). The characters directly translate to: "you" + "well/good". Though it's the Chinese equivalent of "hello," it doesn't exactly have that meaning, if it makes sense. You're greeting someone, and in a way the Chinese greeting is a little more respectful (though of course it depends on your tone of voice as well haha) because it's more mindful of the other person. If I were greeting my grandmother (on my mother's side), I would say: 姥姥好 (lǎolao hǎo), replacing the "you" in the original greeting with "grandmother". And so the Chinese greeting shifts depending on who you're talking to.

Most noticeably, though, the Chinese greeting vaguely resembles a sentence, despite consisting of two words and despite missing a verb. Most sentences do have verbs, but some sentences are just constructed without verbs (or, more specifically, without the "to be" verb).

For instance: 他很棒 (tā hěn bàng). Essentially, this translates to, "He is amazing" (though some of the meaning gets lost in translation), but if I broke it down word by word, it would be: "he" + "very" + "amazing". There's no real verb, but the adverb stands in for one. I don't know why this is, or how it works, but that's just how it is. This type of thing happens especially when describing things or people; saying things like "This is delicious," or "You are beautiful," or "The blanket is warm." Simply put, Chinese just doesn't have the "to be" verb, and the language functions perfectly without it.

I also want to talk about tenses. English (and other romance languages) conjugates the verbs according to tense. "It shuddered, it shudders." / "She walked, she walks." / "He crept, he creeps." In Chinese, though, it's most similar to the future tense in English: instead of directly altering the verb, an additional word is tacked on. For every single tense, including present.

Here is the plain, unaltered word for "eat" in Chinese: 吃 (chī).

I want to quickly take a moment to point out something -- you see that square-shaped bit on the left half of the character? It's the formal Chinese word for "mouth": 口 (kǒu). (There's a much more common word for "mouth" in Chinese, but it's in two syllables. And I'm not quite sure how to explain it, but for a number of body parts, there's a single-syllable, formal way of saying it.) Anyway, a lot of Chinese characters are structured like this, with a thematically-relevant word within a word. Take the word for "path", for example: 路 (lù). The left half of the character is a diminutive version of the formal word for "foot": 足 (zú). Which makes sense, because you use your feet to walk on a path!

Anyway, after that long-winded and rather unnecessary detour, back to "eat". Here are the words for "I ate, I eat, I will eat," respectively: 我吃了 (wǒ chī le)，我在吃 (wǒ zài chī)，我将要吃 (wǒ jiāngyào chī). 我 means "I", and everything else in each phrase is a part of the verb. So you can see that the core verb 吃 remains untouched in each phrase, and it's just that more characters are added around it to create a sense of tense. (Though, if you're saying something like "Tomorrow, I will eat" in Chinese, you shouldn't add the extra characters around 吃, because you've already specified that the action is happening sometime in the future.)

I wanted to quickly mention something else! So all the pronunciations written in the Latin alphabet are called 拼音 (pīnyīn), or "pinyin" in English. (As you can see, English pretty much just took the Chinese word haha.) This is an official part of the Chinese written language, and are used to help children learn to read, or to help illiterate adults as well, because learning to speak Chinese is much, much easier than learning to read it. After all, unlike English, there's no real way to "sound out" the characters; it's all memorization. As you might have noticed, "lǎolao" (grandmother) and "jiāngyào" (future tense "will") are technically comprised of two characters in the Chinese script, but the pinyin smushes the two syllables together. This is because the two characters together form a single word with a single meaning!

The last thing I wanted to say was to just really hammer in how simple the grammar is while simultaneously being ridiculously complex in every other aspect haha. There's a phrase that essentially means "I haven't seen you in such a long time": 好长没见 (hǎo chǎng méi jiàn), and it directly translates to: "really" + "long" + "no" + "see". The subject and the object are both implied in this sentence, and there's no real verb.

Chinese is very cool! And I just got to thinking about it the other day, so I sat down and typed this up haha. I hope you might've learned something reading this, and many apologies for my strange enthusiasm throughout this whole thing; despite not being fluent (at all) in Mandarin, I just find Chinese to be really, really cool haha. LANGUAGE IS AWESOME, GUYS.

So let me know what you think, or if you have any questions! I'd also really love to know if there are any interesting parts of your own language that you'd like to share!