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The most striking difference is the use of ideograms in place of an alphabetic letter system. These were originally pictographs used to represent objects known to the people of ancient china. For instance, the original ancient Chinese symbol for Tiger, Hu, looked just like a simplistic tiger drawing. This was then stylized over the years and morphed into what it looks like today. In addition, Chinese is a tonal language, meaning words are produced with various inflections of the voice--the four main tones are 1) high and flat; 2) rising; 3) falling-rising; and 4) falling.

Modern Chinese uses English punctuation and is read right to left and top to bottom. It primarily uses a Subject-Time-Place-Verb-Object sentence structure. This differs from, say, English which uses a Subject-Verb-Object-Place-Time structure. Classic Chinese, on the other hand, did not use punctuation and was read left to right and top to bottom.

Chinese is a part of the Sino-Tibetan language group. It is not a part of the large language group known as Indo-European. Many of today's languages are related to this group, including English, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. Differences between such language groups usually mean that they developed in areas of geological separation.

Another interesting thing about Chinese is that different areas of the brain are used to read it than what is normally used for alphabetic languages.

is a tonal language

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