• This is an additional Reading Text for the Animation degree programme at QUST/Bradford
• It is uncontroversial to say that reading is probably the best way to extend your vocabulary and the more you read, the greater your vocabulary will be
• As you read the article below, select the correct word from the box to fill the gaps 🙂

These words are from the Academic Word List (AWL) Nouns: distinction concept Adjective: uniform unified Verbs: consists Preposition: despite

About 1.3 billion people (one-fifth of the world) speak Chinese, which means it is the language with the most native speakers. The main two Chinese languages are Mandarin and Cantonese. Standard Mandarin is the official language in mainland China and Taiwan; it is also one of the official languages in Singapore. Cantonese (66 million speakers) is spoken in GuangDong province and is one of the two official languages of Hong Kong (Cantonese & English) and Macau (Cantonese & Portuguese).

Unlike European languages, Chinese make a sharp __________________ between written language (“wen”) and spoken language (“yu”). The written script has historically been fairly ___________________ throughout the Chinese speaking world ___________________ widely different spoken languages. The _______________ of a ___________________ combination of both written and spoken forms of language is, therefore, much less strong in Chinese than in the West.

The written Chinese language _______________________ of about 40,000 characters, which can have as many as 30 strokes. Each character represents a syllable. These syllables are tonal which means that each syllable can have a number of different meanings depending on the intonation with which it is pronounced. For example Mandarin has 4 tones and Cantonese has between 6 and 9.

Sources: Wikipedia and Chinese Language History

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