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Scenario on the Two Popular Languages:
Chinese and English
Contents
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.
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 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.
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
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