Chinese Punctuation

[gato]

Those of you who have studied Chinese for a while know that the Chinese punctuation system is different. It's much less systematic than that for any European languages, it seems. Those who have taught English to Chinese students might be familiar with the experience that Chinese students seem not to be able to grasp the concept of a run-on sentence, for instance.

In any case, I found this useful guide to Chinese punctuation issued by the PRC government in an effort to standardize the use of punctuations. Standardization is needed because classical Chinese, which was the standard written lanaguage of the country until the early 1900s, did not use punctuations marks at all (or at least they were optional).

中华人民共和国国家标准 标点符号用法

Use of punctuation mark

(1995年12月13日发布　1996年6月1日实施)

The attached zipp'ed file contains the text in MS Word format. The text file is in UTF-8.

ChinesePunctuation.zip

ChinesePunctuation.txt

[歐博思]

Holyyy moly, 11 years later I find this gem. I would've felt much more confident in the writing section of the HSK had I seen this before. Definitely worth a read. Five million points for gato.

[889]

Aren't there some other national standards on language, as well?

 

Perhaps someone has a list to post.