高中英语北师大版（2019）必修二Unit 6 The Admirable 单元测试3

    Learning Chinese could be one of the most important decisions you ever make. Chinese is becoming the language to learn in the 21^st century. With the world's largest population and a rapidly growing middle class, China stands to become the engine of the world's economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries, or for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history.

    There is an ongoing effort to modernize the writing system and standardize the language. An increasing number of people learning Chinese are learning the Mandarin, so unless you absolutely need to learn another dialect (such as Cantonese), be sure you are studying Mandarin.

For native English speakers Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn. The vocabulary is wholly unfamiliar and unlike anything we know. In addition, in the Chinese tone system, words are spoken in rising or falling tones, which help to distinguish between them. Furthermore, there is the Chinese writing system— a collection of thousands of individual ideograms (表意文字), or symbols, which represent a word or an idea. These ideograms have no phonetic value—that is to say, we can't tell how the word is pronounced by how it is written. There is a method to present written Chinese in a phonetic script called pinyin. If you are learning Chinese, you'll be working with this pinyin system, but the beauty of the traditional writing system shouldn't be passed up. All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us. Yet, for a determined learner, there's always a way to overcome it.