Cultural tips

Nowadays, among the languages used by different countries in the world, Chinese characters are the non-alphabetic characters. There are many folk legends about the origin of Chinese characters. It is said that there was an ancient people named 仓颉 (Cāng Jié), who got the inspiration to invent Chinese characters by observing the birds' feet prints on the mud. Therefore, he created the earliest Chinese pictographic characters.
Later, the new Chinese archaeologists unearthed a large number of relics in the tomb near Lingyang River, Ju County in China's Shandong Province. They found that some potteries were engraved with Chinese pictographic characters. According to the research, those words have been there for more than 4500 years, and were considered as the first Chinese characters.
To help people correctly identify and read Chinese characters, the Chinese government formally published a “Chinese pinyin program” in 1958. This program adopted Latin alphabets to demonstrate Chinese characters according to the pronunciation of Chinese.
“Chinese pinyin program” is a symbol system to show the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which includes two parts: the initial consonant and vowel, the amount of the former is 21 and the latter is 39.