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And another thing while I'm on the subject of the Chinese language : it's impossible to speak. Well, obviously it's not impossible, 1.3 billion people are currently proving me hopelessly wrong, but you can't just flick through the language section of a guide book and just pick up some useful phrases like you can with European languages*. You don't know that to start with though, so it's easy to convince yourself that Chinese is like all the other languages you've attempted on holiday. Flicking through the the pinyin gives you nothing to contradict your initial belief; spicy chicken is simply gong bao ji din . That looks pretty straightforward, how difficult can it be to order? You spent a week in Sardinia without any Italian language and got by just saying prego and molto bene , Mandarin looks a cinch. Foxed copy of the Lonely Planet in hand then, you march into a restaurant, hold up four fingers in case the waitress has difficulty counting the number o...

On a freezing cold minibus, driving over icy freeways from Xi'an to the wondrous Hua Shan , the Chinese Vincent d'Onofrio lookalike sitting next to me is whiling away the hours like any Western teenager - ferociously texting on two phones simultaneously. As I watch over his shoulder, fascinated, he is filling screen after screen with Chinese characters using just a standard numeric keypad. I have no idea how he's doing it. The spare and elegant efficiency of the Roman alphabet, with its tiny set of written symbols capable of supporting every word known to man and plenty more besides, can be fully appreciated when compared with the beautiful mess that Mandarin seems to be. If I were running a project to design the written representation of a spoken language and my technical architect came back with written Chinese I'd be livid. Each morpheme has its own symbol or logogram , and by some counts there are 60,000 such logograms. According to the Lonely Planet, even the...