Dear Speech Repository community,
This Wednesday, 20 April, is UN Chinese Language Day. In 2010, UNESCO decided to celebrate Chinese as one of the six official languages of the United Nations. On this day, the Chinese-speaking community pays tribute to Cangjie, a mythical figure who is reputed to have invented Chinese characters about 5,000 years ago, inspired by animal and bird footprints in the sand as well as other natural phenomena.
Around one billion people speak Chinese as their first language. Altogether, that amounts to 15% of the world’s population, which is more than all Spanish, English, French and German native speakers combined.
An interesting fact about the Chinese language is that it has many measure words. The place and use of measure words in Chinese can be compared to the use of the word ‘piece’ in English, for example, in the phrase ‘a piece of paper’. Although in Chinese many objects have their own measure words, objects of the same kind or with similar characteristics often use the same measure words. For instance, 纸 zhi (paper), 报纸 baozhi (newspaper), 照片 zhaopian (photo), 画儿 huar (painting) and 邮票 youpiao (stamp) share the measure word 张 zhang (piece). Even 床 chuang (bed) uses the same measure word, 'zhang', because these objects all have a flat surface.
For the Chinese-speaking community in the Speech Repository, we encourage you to have a look at the Mandarin and Cantonese speech collection.
Cantonese: Search speeches | Speech Repository (europa.eu)
Mandarin: Search speeches | Speech Repository (europa.eu)
If you are interested in finding out more about the Chinese language, check out the following speeches:
[EN] Changing popularity of language learning | Speech Repository (europa.eu)
[DE] Mandarin, die chinesische Hochsprache | Speech Repository (europa.eu)
[ZH] The importance of preserving the Cantonese language | Speech Repository (europa.eu)
Happy practising!
Your Speech Repository Team