Empower Your Career With Knowledge of Chinese

China has one of the world's oldest and continuous civilizations, consisting of states and cultures dating back more than six millennia. Ancient China was one of the earliest centers of human civilization. Chinese civilization was also one of the few to invent writing independently.
Historically, China's cultural sphere has extended across East Asia as a whole, with Chinese religion, customs, and cultural systems being assimilated to varying degrees by neighbors such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

The first recorded use of the word "China" is dated in 1555. It is derived from Cin, a Persian name for China popularized in Europe by Marco Polo. In early usage, "china" as a term for porcelain was spelled differently than the name of the country, the two words being derived from separate Persian words. Both these words are derived from the Sanskrit word for China, Cīnā.

The first evidence of human presence in the region was found at the Zhoukoudian (周口店) cave and is one of the first known specimens of Homo erectus, now commonly known as the Beijing Man, estimated to have lived approximately from 300,000 to 550,000 years ago.

Most languages in China belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, spoken by 29 ethnicities. There are also several major linguistic groups within the Chinese language itself. The most spoken varieties are Mandarin, which is spoken by over 70% of the 1.3 billion Chinese people.
In China, vernacular Chinese or baihua (白話) is the written standard based on the Mandarin dialect first popularized in Ming dynasty novels, and was adopted with significant modifications during the early 20th century as the national vernacular.

Most of the Chinese people speak only one common language, their mother tongue. They are not necessarily conversant in English, not to mention the other languages used in Europe. In order to succeed in doing business in China, learning some Mandarin becomes almost a must for serious entrepreneurs thinking of extending their trading horizon.

As one of the Asian modern powers in the world, China maintained a double digit economy growth for several years prior to the recent financial downturn. Its forward looking development in high technology still sustains one of the most prosperous markets in the north hemisphere for foreign investors.
To businessmen born and raised in the occidental culture, there are less people who are exposed to Chinese language and culture in your surrounding world. Thus, there are more opportunities and less competition on the commercial market.

If you would like to familiarize yourself with the Chinese language and extend your working circle towards the China market, we suggest that you should at least acquire some knowledge of the spoken and written Chinese before motions are taken for you to move your business realm towards the Asian Pacific.