Most of the world’s languages are written alphabetically; in an alphabetic writing system the basic components represent sounds only without any reference to meaning. For example, the letter “b” in ...

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over a billion people across Asia and around the globe, making it a useful language for travelers to know. Learning pinyin, which romanizes Chinese characters, can ...

Two books on Chinese writing illustrate how tumultuous technological evolution can be. Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the ...

At this very moment, the words you are reading are entering your mind at the speed of thought. Below your awareness, strings of letters are retrieving words and meanings as effortlessly as oxygen ...

Few things in Chinese culture are more widely misunderstood outside of China than the Chinese language. The Chinese write very differently from us and indeed from all other literate societies in today ...