chinese characters are used to write various languages in china and elsewhere, including mandarin, the most widely spoken language in china, cantonese, spoken in hong kong and southern china, and classical chinese, traditionally used for formal writing. the characters were formerly used in korea and in vietnam. japan uses a mix of chinese characters and native phonetic script. even characters that retain their original meaning in all languages may be read in various ways. the character 十 is given as "shí" in chinese romanization (pinyin), "jū" in japanese romanization (hepburn), "sip" in korean romanization (revised romanization), and "thập" in the han-viet system used in vietnam. in all these languages, the meaning of the character is “ten.”