What are strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese language?

Everything has its specific characteristics. Those specific characteristics are its strengths and weaknesses.

Their written Chinese is not spelled. Chinese characters are not symbols indicating sounds of the language, but symbols mapping the objects of the universe, human society included. China has as many spoken dialects as Europe has spoken languages. China had been unified two thousand years ago with one written language. Europe cannot unify til now except the Brexit. European use of spelling languages hindered its unification. A unified civilization has the advantage of lower transaction costs. That’s why China used to be the largest civilization since ancient times. Of cause, there are so many Chinese characters compared to the 26 alphabet that maps the sounds of language, the Chinese language has the weakness of being difficult to learn.

Being symbols of objects and concepts, the Chinese language is also good to organize knowledge. Chinese people know much knowledge outside their professional fields because when they read the written language, they can sense the meaning, not just the pronunciation. Facing the explosion of information, the Chinese language has the advantage of easy to grasp the whole picture of the world.

Because Chinese characters do not represent phonemes but meaning, reading the Chinese language has to trigger both hemispheres of the brain. European people use only the left hemisphere to process language, while the Chinese have to use both. That’s why the Chinese language is difficult. However, when one learns Chinese from childhood, it is not really difficult but has the advantage of better growth and development of the brain. If you want your child to be smart, let him or she learn Chinese as early as possible.

The Chinese language is a tone language. Chinese not only can speak their language but also can sing their language. That’s beautiful. Classical Chinese poetry is actually a song. Classical Chinese poetry is lyric with melody and rhythm embedded.