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Chinese writing is very different from most other languages in the world. In the Chinese
writing system, Chinese symbols represent each character which corresponds to a single
spoken syllable. A majority of words in all modern varieties of Chinese require two or
more characters to write. Many Chinese characters were adopted according to their meaning by
the Japanese and Korean languages to represent native words, disregarding pronunciation altogether.
Chinese characters are also considered to be the world's longest continuously used writing
system.