19 differences between English and Chinese

There are some significant differences between Chinese and English languages.

Be aware of these dissimilarities, it will enable the western Chinese learning students to learn Chinese easier and in addition to take his/her language skills more advanced.

This article highlights some significant differences between Chinese and English.

1, English depends on structures to express ideas while Chinese does not

It’s mean that as long as the structure of the sentence is grammatically accurate, it can be used to deliver ideas no matter how long and complex the sentence is. It is usual in English to use very long and challenging sentences for expression.

In construct, the Chinese ‘wants’ the meaning to be understood easily and clearly and therefore does not depend on large structures for expression but in its place divides the long sentence into several shorter ones.

Consequently, it is prevalent to see long sentences in English using a lot of modifiers and, in contrast, many short sentences in Chinese connecting with comma.

The message for the Chinese learning student is this: when dealing with the Chinese language, ‘Get the meaning, forget the words.’

2, English use Pronouns

English very commonly uses pronouns like: ‘she,’ ‘you,’ ‘we,’ ‘which,’ ‘they,’ ‘that’ to make the long sentences more transparent and without repeats.

Because of the short sentences in Chinese, there is no need to use pronouns, and that is why in Chinese language nouns are much more in use than pronouns.
 

3, English uses the Passive voice

English use passive voice while the Chinese use the active voice. Chinese barely uses the passive voice and generally use the active voice for expression.

For instance, ‘It is widely believed that…’ In the Chinese language, it is expressed as: ‘People generally believe that…’

4, There is a difference in Verb/Tense aspect

English mostly uses auxiliaries and verb inflections such as are/is/were/Eat/eats/ate/eaten, etc.

On the other hand, Chinese is an uninflected language and delivers meaning through word order, adverbials, or shared understanding of the context.

Chinese does not use different verb and tenses to express the concept of time. Except in cases, when the emphasis of the time is necessary, the time is often understood by the context. This is a big advantage for the Chinese learner because it simplifies the Chinese grammar.

5, The difference in the vocabulary aspect

The Chinese language is vibrant, and different nuances of the same word in English needs a different word in Chinese.

Most of the dictionaries do not make the slight differences between similar Chinese words clear and, therefore, cannot be trusted entirely. For the Chinese learner, it means do not depend only on the dictionary to use Chinese.

The student can overcome this difficulty by lots of Chinese reading, listening to Chinese, and taking private lessons with a native Chinese teacher.

6, English uses abstract vocabulary

For expression, English uses abstract vocabulary much more than Chinese. While the Chinese language often uses definite, concrete objects to express abstract ones.

This characteristic is a result of Chinese philosophy, which is based on nature. The message for Chinese learners: put more emphasis on mastering Chinese idioms because the Chinese idioms make use of real objects to express abstract ideas and, besides, make use of allegories while using Chinese. This will make your language skills advance.

7, Chinese has no singular and plural

Chinese does not differentiate between countable and non-countable nouns; one child, one money, one homework.

8, No gender form in Chinese

Believe it or not, the Mandarin language is similar to English grammar in several ways.

But some find it more comfortable than the English language. It is because they do not have gender forms like ‘she, he, and it’– which have the same pronunciation.

It is not necessary to memorize these forms, and this makes the Chinese grammar more comfortable to learn for the western mandarin student.

9, Alphabet

The Chinese language does not use an alphabet. What they have is a logographic system which is used in written language.

This system use symbols that signify the words, which means a single word is not written with letters, unlike in the English language.

10, Tone or Phonology

There are four tones in the Chinese language, excluding the neutral tone, which is seldom used.

These tones allow Chinese syllables to be pronounced in several ways to emphasize the four different meanings of the word being spoken.

Unlike the English that uses tones to express or stress emotions.

11, No Nominative cases

Chinese has no Accusative or Nominative cases. Such as ‘me’ and ‘I’ are the same, as are ‘he’ and ‘him,’ ‘she’ and ‘her.’

12, No Genitive case

Chinese has no genitive case in either nouns or verbs: One word (de) is used to indicate possession. ‘I de’ is ‘my’ or ‘mine.’ Etc.

The verb “to be” is extensively in use in English but not in Chinese. For insistence: ‘we will be together’ is expressed in Chinese as: ‘we together.’

13, A noun is also a verb in Chinese

It is ubiquitous in Chinese that a noun is also a verb and/or adjective. This hardly exists in English.

Chinese has no negative questions. Never say to a Chinese friend ‘You are not going to the party, are you?’ If he is not going, he will answer, Yes.

14, English puts more stress on the first part of the sentence

English puts more weight on the first part of the sentence, while the Chinese emphasized the last part of the sentence.

This distinguishing is especially apparent in sentences, which include logic with drawing conclusions or expression of results. In English, the conclusion is defined first, and the facts are described at the end of the sentence.

In Chinese, it is the opposite. First, the facts will be determined, then the results, conclusions, etc.

15, Articles and word order

The Chinese language is lacking articles; you have to begin by grasping the concept first before you even initiate forming sentences.

In Chinese, questions are delver through intonation, and unlike English, the verb and the subject are not inverted.

So, when your mind is in the early stages of learning the new language, you attempt to put the rules of Chinese into English wordplay and end up with typically unfamiliar sounding sentences, also one of the causes why we have so many bad jokes.

16, Words You Use

Let’s take the example of phrasal verbs here. These are verbs that are short and commonly combine with prepositions such as ‘take on,’ ‘give in,’ etc.

In Chinese, there is no such thing as that in their language, so again, a good idea would be, to begin with grasping the concept and then moving on to the structure of the sentence.

So, these are the dissimilarities between English and Chinese you should pay close attention to. They are very significant if you want to become an advanced Chinese speaker, and that is the reason you should always remember them.

17, Total numbers of speakers

The most spoken language in the world is Chinese; more than one billion people one out of sixth humans on Earth, speak it.

However, that is because there are more people born in Chinese-speaking regions than English ones; almost twenty percent of people are Chinese.

Far more humans use American English as their 2nd language, about 5.1 million, which is five times more than the Chinese since America has the most powerful economic system in the world.

This has transformed in the last few decades, though; more people started to learn the Chinese language because China’s international status is growing, and it has improved a lot in diplomacy after the ‘reforming and opening-up policy’ during the 1980s.

18, History

The English language begins with three Germanic tribes who occupied Britain during the 5th century. The tribes, who were named the Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes, crossed the North Sea to invade England. After years and years of developing and changing, people started to speak modern English.

Two of the most noteworthy changes were the Great Vowel Shift (meaning to pronounce vowels shorter) and the Renaissance of Classical (creating new phrases and words).

Later, a massive amount of new words were added to Modern English. Rising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology formed a need for new words; secondly, because the British Empire enclosed almost one-quarter of the earth’s surface, it accepted foreign words from many countries.

Today, more humans are speaking English, and there are many forms of it, such as Canadian English, American English (which is used the most), Australian English, Indian English, South African English, and Caribbean English.

On the other hand, Chinese characters were stamped on a turtle’s shell at first, used to record months and years.

Later, the Chinese created paper, and more humans were educated. Poems were very common at that time, so poets and scholars wrote poems and books to express their emotions and feelings.

After the Industrial Revolution, China begins to interact more with the European countries, and students went to study abroad. The students who studied abroad brought new ideas and thoughts (such as democracy and science) back to China, and they changed the official language from traditional Chinese to modern Chinese, which is easy to write and read.

Also, many new words were translated from English to Chinese, and this is the language Chinese speak today.

19, Writing

The English writing system, which is a Latin phonetic alphabet, originated from the Romans who copied the Greeks who copied the Phoenicians. That is why many of the European and American countries have similar languages.

Speaking these languages can be easy because you can usually read a word based on phonics even if you do not know the actual meaning.

The Chinese writing system is more complex because every one of the characters is based on a picture. People sketched the shape of creatures and simplified them into characters.

Though the words were simplified already, they are still hard to write – one character can contain up to 33 strokes.

So, which one is hard? I would say that English is tougher to speak but easy to write.

In English, there is much grammar and many tenses to pay attention to; but in Chinese, every character is so complex.

However, whether a language is easy or hard depends on what language you already speak and which environment you live in.

In fact, almost every adult fights to learn a second language, but to kids, they learn all languages natively with about the same comfort.

The great way to learn a language is to do a vast amount of speaking, reading, and writing. When you can speak it fluently, that is when you become a language master.