Chinese speaker here: No, we are not. Classical Chinese is a very different language but generally the basics are taught in school. It definitely takes significant effort because the grammar and vocabulary are completely different.
Written Chinese was reformed in the beginning of 20th century to be closer to the spoken language.
Before that, it would have been true except written language was so distant from spoken, I would call them almost different languages (but that’s because I’m no linguist, and someone here already told me that writing is not a language at all anyway), so the only literate people were able to read literature of the old
I think I read somewhere that Chinese readers are able to read 2000 year old texts with relatively little difficulty.
Chinese speaker here: No, we are not. Classical Chinese is a very different language but generally the basics are taught in school. It definitely takes significant effort because the grammar and vocabulary are completely different.
Yeah that’s apparently a thing. Same principle too, except with logograms rather than an abjad.
Written Chinese was reformed in the beginning of 20th century to be closer to the spoken language.
Before that, it would have been true except written language was so distant from spoken, I would call them almost different languages (but that’s because I’m no linguist, and someone here already told me that writing is not a language at all anyway), so the only literate people were able to read literature of the old