Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

Foreign students of Chinese will be relieved to learn that an understanding of most of the content of the country's media will require a working knowledge of just 900 characters out of the roughly 50,000 individual pictographs available, Reuters reports.

Specifically, a grasp of said 900 pictographs will allow access to 90 per cent of content, as Chinese media continues a process of linguistic simplification, according to an education ministry survey which examined "900m characters used in more than 8.9m files chosen from newspapers, magazines, the internet and television", according to Xinhua news agency.

Although Reuters notes that many traditional, aka "complex", characters are still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and in Chinese expat communities abroad, linguistic homogenisation, and with it simplification, are gradually consigning these to history as mainland Chinese influence grows.

The culling of characters began in China in 1940, as a way of tackling the estimated 80 per cent illiteracy rate, Reuters says. According to zhongwen.com, peasant literacy was quantified in 1952 as a command of 1,500 characters. Workers, on the other hand, were expected to handle 2,000. It appears, then, that the Chinese have had some considerable success in sorting the vital wheat from the superfluous chaff.

For those interested in just how the Chinese came to have such an impressively complicated written language, zhongwen.com has some fairly terrifying etymological trees showing how individual characters are combined to create dense levels of meaning. Make yourselves a strong cup of green tea before venturing in. ®

What you need to know about cloud backup