Differences between English and Chinese

Introduction: There is not only one kind of Chinese, but many different versions or dialects, including Wu, Cantonese and Taiwanese. Northern Chinese, also known as Putonghua, is the mother tongue of about 70% people in China, and it is also the written language recognized by all people in China. English and Chinese belong to two different language families, and there are many significant differences. This makes learning English a severe challenge for native speakers in China.

Alphabet: China does not have an alphabet, but uses a symbol system as its written language. In the identification system, symbols represent the words themselves-words are not composed of various letters like the alphabet system. Because of this fundamental difference, China learners may have great difficulties in reading English texts and spelling words correctly.

Phonetics: Most aspects of English phonetics system cause difficulties for learners in China. Some English phonemes do not exist in Chinese; Stress and intonation patterns are different. Unlike English, Chinese is a kind of tonal language. This means that it uses the pitch (high or low) of phoneme sounds to distinguish word meanings. In English, the change of pitch is used to emphasize or express emotion, not to give different meanings to sounds.

There are more vowels in English than in Chinese, which leads to incorrect pronunciation of words such as ship/sheep, it/eat and full/fool. Double sounds like weigh, now or deer are often shortened to one sound.

China learners find it hard to tell the difference between L and R, so they may mispronounce rake and rice as lake and lice. A major problem is the last consonant that is common in English. This feature is not common in Chinese, which leads learners to either fail to pronounce consonants or add a vowel at the end of words. For example, hill may be pronounced without a double ll, but with an elongated I, or rhymes with killer.

The difficulty in pronouncing a single English word, coupled with intonation problems, has caused many China learners to have a strong English accent. In some cases, even learners with perfect grammar may find it difficult to understand.

Grammar-verb/tense: In English, a lot of information is conveyed by using auxiliary verbs and verb changes: is/are/were, eat/eats/ate/eaten, etc. On the other hand, Chinese is a non-inflectional language, which conveys meaning through word order, adverbial or common understanding of context. The concept of time in Chinese is not handled by using different tenses and verb forms as in English. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that China learners encounter difficulties in the complexity of the English verb system.

The following are some typical verb/tense errors:

What do you do? What are you doing? ) (the tense is wrong)

I'll call you as soon as I get there. (wrong tense)

She got married last Saturday. (wrong tense)

She is a good teacher. (missing copula)

How much did your car cost? (Lack of auxiliary equipment)

I wish I were rich. (indicative rather than virtual)

English usually uses modal verbs to express different meanings. For example, consider the increase in politeness of the following instructions:

Please open the window.

Can you open the window?

Would you mind opening the window?

Because Chinese modal verbs cannot express such a wide range of meanings, China learners may not be able to make full use of English modal verbs. This will cause them to appear bossy when making demands, suggestions, etc.

Grammar-Other: There are no articles in Chinese, so it is difficult to use them correctly in English.

Chinese and English are different in word order. Taking Chinese as an example, questions are conveyed through intonation; Subject and verb are not inverted as in English. Nouns cannot be postmodified like English; Adverbials usually precede verbs, unlike complicated rules in English that control the position of these sentence elements. As a result, the interference from China people led to the following typical problems:

When will you go home?

English is a very difficult language to learn.

I will return to China next week. ) Return to China next week. )

Vocabulary: There are many short verbs in English, which are usually combined with auxiliary words (adverbs or prepositions) to form so-called phrasal verbs; For example: commitment, concession, making do, looking up. This lexical feature does not exist in Chinese. Therefore, learners in China may experience serious difficulties in understanding articles containing these verbs and avoid trying to use them themselves.

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