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Why Study Chinese?

There are more than a billion speakers of Chinese around the world, including a substantial population in the US. The Chinese writing system is one of the very few independently invented writing systems in all of human history and it dates back at least to the third millennium BCE.  An astounding number of Chinese texts written in the traditional period have been transmitted to the present.  For many periods during its history, China was the most culturally, economically, technologically, and scientifically dominant nation in East Asia, where the Chinese writing system was widely learned and taught and Chinese characters were incorporated into the native writing systems of nations stretching from Japan to Vietnam.  Chinese culture has long enjoyed global recognition, in recent years in the form of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Gao Xingjian, the growing familiarity with Peking opera, and the widespread influence of films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Farewell my Concubine.