Private Homepage           Work Page              email

Scenario on the Two Popular Languages:

Chinese and English


                    Contents

                             General Idea

                             Subjects

                             Differences between English and Chinese

                             Activities

                             References


General Idea

        Nowadays Chinese and English are the two languages which are spoken by the largest number of people in the world. With the development of China, more and more people are interested in learning Chinese. But it is really very difficult for the westerners to learn it. On the one hand, the Chinese language is totally different from the western alphabetic languages in both writing and pronunciation. On the other hand, Chinese culture is quite different too, and which is another very important factor for many people to learn the language. Meanwhile English is evidently becoming the international language and it is an indisponsible tool to communicate with other nations. By focusing on the basic elements of languages, this scenario tends to show some differences between English and Chinese, with the hope of helping people in some way to learn the two languages.
 

Subjects

        The subjects of this scenario are those people who want to learn Chinese or those who are interested to know something about the Chinese language and eventually learn it. It  is also of some value to the Chinese college students and all those who have already got an elementary level of English and are interested in going on learning it.

Differences between Chinese and English:

        Chinese characters and English words

        Generally speaking, all the languages in the world can be divided into two kinds: alphabetic writing and ideograph. As is well known, Chinese is ideograph. Compared with alphabetic writing, the biggest characteristic of Chinese is that it shows the sense. We know that the words of languages are always the unity of phonetic forms and meaning contents. The Chinese characters are the writing forms of the Chinese terms. Both the sound and the sense prescribe the writing forms. The writing symbols are prescribed either from the speech sounds or from meaning. From either of them the writing system can be built. Those based on speech sounds are called alphabetic writing, and those based on the meaning are called ideograph.
        The modern Chinese characters are built on the meanings, although, of course, we cannot see it directly now. But if we trace to thousands of years ago, it will be better to understand. In the ancient characters, people used the method of "image description" to show meanings, but this did not break the unity of sounds and meaning. From the forms of some of the characters we can see the meanings and from the meanings we decide the sounds, like the pictographic characters. On the other hand, for the alphabetic writing, we get the sound from the form and from the sound we decide the meaning.
       The Chinese characters are composed of strokes which are the smallest units in the language. Each character is just like a building and has its own interior structure. Some are simple and others are more complicated. Each one is independent and they have to be memorized one by one. Besides for most of the characters there are no "rules" like those in English in pronunciation and spelling.
        On the other hand, in English as in all the other alphabetic writing languages, the words are combinations of letters. When we see the words, we can easily pronounce them.
        Comparatively speaking, Chinese is more difficult to learn. But for the Chinese people, we have got used to the characters. To learn the letters is quite easy, since we have all the 26 letters in the Chinese phonetics "Pinyin", but to learn all the combinations of them is quite another thing.
 

        Chinese Pinyin and English Phonetics

        Chinese Pinyin is quite different from English phonetics. By Pinyin, it means to combine phonemes which are separated from syllables of a certain language  into syllables again, according to the syllable combination laws of the language. For example, to combine 't' and 'a' which are separated from syllables of course, into 'ta' (meaning "he" or "she"  )
        The Pinyin of Putonghua/Mandarin ( standard Chinese) is the combination of consonants and vowels. There are 21 consonants and 24 vowels in Pinyin. In Pinyin, we have four tones for the characters. The same sound in different tones represent different characters and different meanings, e.g. da("-": tone one)(put ... on...),  da("/": tone two)(arrive), da("\/": tone three)(hit), da("\": tone four)(big). For further knowledge of the Chinese Pinyin, you may also consult English-Chinese Dictionary and Chinese-English Dictionary.
        In English, there are there is no tones for words except the stress. In sentences there are only two tones: falling or rising. The Chinese has got used to the tones of the characters and it is not so easy to change to the simpler rising and falling tones. That is why most Chinese students tend to read English either word by word or in most cases in the falling tone whether it is within a sentence or at the end, even for general questions they tend to read them in the falling tone instead of the rising one. This is a typical Chinese way of reading English.

      Chinese Grammar and English Grammar

      Comparatively speaking, Chinese has much less grammar than English. In Chinese we have the grammatical units like characters, words or terms, phrases and sentences. Chinese depends mainly on its characters to realize its grammatical functions. There is no changes in affixes. In fact, there is no affixes for Characters. But there are many changes with the terms or words which are formed with characters. All the grammatical changes depend on characters or terms, e.g. we use auxiliaries to show the tenses, voices, moods, cases, etc. In one word, Chinese grammar depends mainly on different parts of speech to realize its syntax.
      On the contrary, English grammar depends mainly on the changes of the words themselves to show different grammatical elements. For example, the tenses are realized through the changes of verbs; the numbers of nouns are realized by adding -s to the end of nouns or through the changes of the nouns themselves, etc.

       In short, Chinese and English are quite different. But still there are similarities in the two languages. For example, the Chinese Pinyin contents all the 26 letters of English. There are quite a few phonemes which are similar in both the languages. In grammar, the parts of speech are almost the same except that there are no articles in Chinese and there are no auxiliaries in English like those in Chinese. As for sentence structure, they are quite similar in the order of S+V+O. They are so similar in some ways that some people even think that English borrowed something in grammar from Chinese ---the chinesization of English.

Activities

        There is an activity for learning to write Chinese characters. When you click on the linked characters you may find the correct way to write them as well as their meanings. Another one is that by clicking on a word, you can find the translation from English to Chinese  appearing in the picture. The last one is that you can hear the right pronunciations of some Chinese expressions by clicking on them.

References:

W. F. Bolton  A Short History of Literary English     Edward Arnold (Publishers) LTD  London  1967
Daniel Jones  An Outline of English Phonetics          Cambridge University Press  1972
Li Junfeng & Wang Jiayang  College English Grammar     Haichao Publishing House  Beijing 1990
Staff of the Chinese Faculty of Jilin Teacher's University   Basic Knowledge of Chinese Language   Jilin People's Publishing House  1980
web site: http://www.ocrat.com/ocrat/chargif/
             http://www.webcom.com/bamboo/chinese/chinese.html
             http://www.1jn.com/1/chinese.html


Return to the top