Title of Nonfiction Read: Chinese Cultural Studies: The Language and Writing
Written by: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia
I. There has always been one method for writing Chinese, and a common literary and cultural history. There are eight main dialects in speech in China. The language dialects depend on the location. The 20th century was the most ambitious time of program of language planning out that the world has ever seen. The program had three goals. One, to simplify the characters of classical written Chinese, which they did by cutting down the amount of strokes required to write one character. Two, to provide one way of spoken communication throughout all of China which they did by making the Beijing-based variety of language more popular because it was chosen as the standard language. Three, to create a phonetic alphabet that would slowly become the Chinese characters for every say use.
II. 1. Terse (terse grammatical style), vernacular (vernacular style of writing)
2. I resolved my problem by looking at the meaning in the dictionary, then re reading the sentence that included the word.
III. He was explaining the language very vaguely, and talking about the different types and ways to improve the Chinese language that they have been working on.
IV. 1.I agreed with how he came up with points that the Chinese language system should start, like making one really national language because there is so many different types of Chinese language.
2.I disagree with the piece that says that in the future, only pin yin will exist. I believe that since it’s so different than letters, they will keep the character writing.
V. I think the piece was very well written and organized nicely with all of the different topics, and I agree with 90 percent of the ideas written.

Title of Nonfiction Read: History of Chinese Writing System
Written by: editors of Char4U.com
I. Chinese is one of the oldest known written language. There are early examples from ancient China that date back to over four thousand years ago. A logographic system is used for this language, which is a set of symbols that represent a word or phrase. They call these Chinese symbols characters. China has two main languages, Mandarin and Cantonese. Many dialects evolved from these two languages. The Chinese writing system is what unifies all of these languages into one written language. The Chinese writing system has changed a lot, but there are four different periods of Chinese writing that really pop out. These are Jia-gu wen, Da zhuan, Xiao zhuan and Lis shu. Some symbols ar4e drawn in an artsy way called calligraphy. Chinese characters are written in columns and you read from top to bottom or right to left
II. 1.Circumvent (in effort to circumvent this problem) and 2, I looked up the world and re read the sentence and paragraph by using my new found knowledge.
III. It explains more of the historical part of the language, which is very important. It also discussed how it goes from pin yin to dialects then to characters.
IV. There weren’t really any opinions to agree or disagree with, just informational facts.
V. Once again, this writing was very well organized and the information as useful to my