In ancient Chinese in China, a syllable is often a word, with few exceptions of conjunctions. We can think of it as one word, one word at a time.
In modern Chinese in China, monosyllabic words become less and less, and disyllabic words become more and more. But the rule of one word at a time still exists.
In English and other western languages, there are also polysyllabic words and words with multiple morphemes. Especially newly coined words.
At present, the English vocabulary has exceeded 6.5438+0 million, while the Chinese vocabulary commonly used in China is only about 3,500. It is precisely because of the rule of one sound and one word that there are not many commonly used words in Chinese characters, but there are countless commonly used words.
From this point of view, Chinese is easier to learn than English.
Both Chinese and English are phonetic "Pinyin", and the characters can be divided into phonography and ideographic characters. However, there is no morphological change in Chinese grammar, which is also determined by the phonetic characteristics of Chinese.
One of the reasons why Chinese can express a meaning with one syllable is that Chinese pronunciation has tones, which greatly increases the means of semantic differentiation. There are a large number of homophones and homophones in Chinese, but they can express different meanings in specific contexts.
One syllable and one meaning in Chinese-meaning or morpheme meaning: polysemy, in a specific context, is also a homonym. When English was first created, it didn't choose the construction method of one syllable and one meaning, which may be the strong evidence that China people are smarter.
Let's take a look at a passage from teacher Fang Fan:
Primary school students in the United States must learn "spelling" as soon as they go to school. Because English is different from other western languages, such as French, Spanish, German and even Russian, you can read and write, and you can read words by knowing letters. However, English knows the pronunciation of letters, but basically can't read words. The English name of Buick, a household name in China, is Buick. People in China transliterate Buick, but the pronunciation should be similar to that outside Biao. Without the note "W", the letter ui is pronounced "Wei", which is difficult to understand. In San Jose, California, English is San Jose, while "J" actually sounds like "H" and "E" actually sounds like "A", which is also puzzling for many English learners (because it is a Spanish word). Even though I am an English speaker, there are some things I don't understand. The English word for "timetable" is sCHedule, and the English pronunciation is only two syllables "Snow Lost", but Americans read the word "stone cover" into three syllables. Here "ch" is pronounced as "k", and the British can't understand why Americans read it like this.
Spelling is to teach primary school students how to read the arrangement of letters and how to pronounce them, and there are many exceptional pronunciation rules. I can't help it There are too many words in English, such as Dutch, German, Latin, Spanish and French, which make the pronunciation completely out of line with the pronunciation rules of English itself.
In fact, Chinese is also like this. For example, a widely used word "bill" is often misused as "bill", which is the sequela caused by the introduction of typical Mandarin into Guangzhou dialect.
Among the common English words, there are basically no words that can express their meaning in words. In Chinese, anyone who knows the word "platypus" can guess its meaning: it refers to an animal, a beast with a mouth like a duck. However, people who see the word "platypus" and have never studied monotremes have no idea what it is. In the specialized disciplines of natural science, because of the extensive use of Latin, we can see a lot more literary meanings. For example, the word polysaccharidepeptides is very long, but it is easy to remember, because "poly" means Duo, "sugar" means sugar, and "peptide" means peptide. But we immediately found that if English is to achieve meaning, words will definitely be very long, and it is very easy to remember words unless abbreviations are used (such as DNA, which is the abbreviation of deoxyribonucleic acid). Virtue is division, oxy is oxygen, ribo is ribose, nucleus is nucleus and Acid is acid.
Similarities and differences between English phonemes and Chinese phonemes
There are some similarities in the sound system of human language. Any language has vowels and consonants, and the pronunciation organs used are basically the same. In this sense, similarities in pronunciation between English and Chinese can be seen everywhere. In consonants, the pronunciation is the same.
Locally, both languages have double lip sound, lip tooth sound, hard tooth sound and soft tooth sound.
In pronunciation, both languages have nasal sound, plosive sound, fricative sound, near sound and tongue sound. There are six basic vowels in Chinese and eight in English. The correct pronunciation of these sounds is different even if the pronunciation method is the same. But both languages use three variables to distinguish vowels: (pronunciation position) height, (pronunciation position) front and back and the degree of round lips.
There are 48 phonemes in English and 44 in Chinese. In fact, no two phonemes in English and Chinese are exactly the same, regardless of whether their phonetic symbols are the same or not. There are some basic pronunciation differences between the two languages. Jakobson (1963) described the sound characteristics of a language as "tension" or "relaxation". "Relaxation" is the result of short vocal cavity. When "nervous", the vocal organs change greatly; When you relax, the pronunciation organs don't change much. Most phonemes in English are characterized by "tension", while Chinese pronunciation is generally characterized by "relaxation". So in terms of pronunciation, to some extent, English is a "nervous" language, while Chinese is a "relaxed" language. This is why there are some differences between English and Chinese pronunciation. As far as vowels are concerned, the biggest difference between English and Chinese lies in.
There are fundamental differences between /a/, /a/, /a/ and /u/ in English. In Chinese, the highest point of these sounds is much higher than that of English. As far as consonants are concerned, there is no obvious sonic boom in Chinese. B, P, D, T, G and K in Chinese Pinyin are different from /P/, /B/, /D in English. Make it really pronounced as /bo/, /po/, /da/, /to/, /go/, /ka/, thus losing the real blasting.