Reading the chinese writing system based on chinese characters has played a crucial role in our culture and society. The feature article below is about chinese characters. Before you read the article, think about the following questions. What do you know about the development of chinese characters? What other writing systems are you familiar with? Chinese characters foundation of a remarkable writing system. In the year eighteen ninety nine, some mystic symbols carved ed on oracle bones, attracted the attention of a scholar in beijing. That was when people first began to realize the significance of these beautiful inscriptions. Since then, the mystery surrounding the origin of chinese characters, the foundation of a remarkable writing system has started to be revealed. These are bone inscriptions, the earliest form of chinese characters ever found. To this day, ucar approved that the history of the chinese writing system stretches back about three thousand five hundred years. The inscriptions are highly complex, suggesting that earlier forms are yet to be discovered. All we have at the moment, however, is the legend of sign gear, who is said to have invented the first characters about five thousand years ago. Legend has IT that he saw animal tracks in the ground and began drawing pictures of objects in nature, such as the moon, the sun and the trees. Not surprisingly, the earliest chinese characters were the fruits of our ancestors, careful observation and striking imagination. The chinese character sun, for example, is simply a drawing of a mountain. However, our ancestors found not everything was convenient to draw as a concrete image, so another way of forming chinese characters was developed to represent abstract concepts. Some characters were created by adding symbols like a dot or a line to an existing pictographic character to indicate things. For instance, the characters shen and sheer indicate things on top of a ambo a line. Gradually, these characters were far from enough to describe the colorful and diverse world. So a new way of forming characters was developed by putting together different characters to indicate a new meaning. An example of this is the character mean, which combines ref, sun and you for moon to express the meaning of being bright. These types of characters indicate meaning, but they do not provide clues about their pronunciation. Another group of characters were created by combining meaning and principle in who the chinese character for lake. For instance, the left part indicates the meaning and the right part of pronunciation. This method made IT easier to create new characters, so most chinese characters today belong to this group. Since their creation, chinese characters have been evolving consistently, increasing in practical value as a communication tool. About one thousand years after the oracle bone inscriptions were used during the same dynasty, gi one unified china and shelf wan was made the official writing style of the chin dynasty. Then lisi became a mainstream style of writing in the honda sty. The evolution from charge wanted lee sue marked a revolutionary transformation from ancient characters into modern characters. Another milestone in the evolution of the style of chinese characters was Katie, which reached its peak in the tang dynasty. IT became popular for its ease of views and eventually progressed into what we now consider to be the standard script. Apart from changes in writing style, chinese characters have been simplified so that they can be used more easily by the masses. Even in modern times, there have been attempts to simplify chinese characters. One far reaching change took place in the one thousand and fifties when the chinese government simplified and standardized chinese characters, promoting mass literacy along side their evolution. Chinese characters have sustained chinese civilization over thousands of years. Thanks to chinese characters, stories of our ancestors have been passed down in a form that remains accessible to us today, and the glorious history of our country has been preserved. Moreover, chinese characters have greatly influenced the writing systems in many other asian countries such as japan and vietnam, forming the chinese character cultural sphere. For instance, IT was only after chinese character spread to japan, but the japanese writing system started to be developed with the spread of chinese characters. Educated people in these countries, carefully studied chinese literary and philosophical text such as the works of the tank dynasty poets and the analysts of confucius, and learned the art of chinese collection phy. As we can see, chinese characters hold the key to promoting the transmission of chinese culture. According to the famous writer u. Guang show, ever since chinese characters were born in ancient times, the memories and hopes of our ancestors have been well placed in them. Indeed, chinese characters provide an unbreakable building to our nations passed, and connect us to our ancestors. Every time we read all right chinese characters, the whispers of our ancestors travel through time and space and bring with them the stories of human civilization.