In daily life, there are many common words that you may hear or use in spoken language without knowing their characters. Various dialects have a such example.

It is mainly due to the evolution of language. Our daily spoken is a frequently-used but old-fashioned language, in which more ancient traditional vocabulary (including meaning and pronunciation) has been preserved. While written language is often affected by foreign language through school education and social dissemination. You may not notice that in modern Chinese, the initial “b” of “爸(bà)爸” kept a very old pronunciation, while the initial “f” of “父(fù)亲” appeared rather late.

Therefore, the common words of politics, economy and science are rarely hardly writing. Even if you can not write, you will easily check it in dictionaries. Many common words in daily life, kitchen, traditional farm work, etc. are little known about their writing. Some practical pamphlets are thus published such as “Collection of Daily Words” and “Collection of Rural Words” which assist us in writing these spoken words. However, these words are used much less than before in the younger generation, although they still live in their mothers and grandmothers’ spoken language.