written Chinese language

Written Chinese is a writing system that transcribes the varieties of Chinese language using logograms ??? known as characters ??? and other symbols such as punctuations. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components known as radicals or pianpang that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000 characters. This has led in part to the modern adoption of complementary phonetic transcription systems such as Pinyin and Bopomofo to transliterate the pronunciation of each character.

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