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Chinese versus English

Introduction

There is no single language that is used in China, however, there are various versions that involves Wu language, Cantonese and Taiwanese languages. However, the Mandarin of the northern region is the mother tongue to almost 70 percent of the Chinese people and therefore accepted as the knowledge for all the Chinese people. Knowledge is a language that comprises various domains. This involves; first, Phonology, this is a system in which organization of sounds is achieved. Second, Morphology; these are elements that are meaningful and how they have been organized to form words. Third, Syntax; these are the various ways of sentence formation (Lin, P.3). Chinese and English tend languages to employ the above domains in there structures to come up with to come up with effective communication. This research therefore looks at the morphological, phonological and syntactical domains in order to show the similarities and differences within this two languages. Comment by Jennifer Haan: Use MLA citation for formatting throughout

Similarities between English and Chinese Languages

English and Chinese languages are similar in terms of grammar. In Chinese language, a simple sentence structure comprises of the subject, a predicate and also an object. For instance: Comment by Jennifer Haan: Verb form

In English “I wash my hands”

In Chinese “我 Wo (I) 洗 xi 手 shou.”

This makes Chinese grammar appear somehow simpler as compared to English Grammr. For example, the Chinese language doesn’t contain all the various forms that are based on singular/plural (Liang, Para. 3)

The syllables of the Chinese language comprises of three features. The tone, initial and final sound financial. The initial Consonants make up the initial sound while the final file is made up of at minimum one vowel. Some of the syllables contain only the initial or the final sound. Chinese language is composed of 21 initial sounds while final sounds are 35 in number with 413 various combinations? If the four mandarin Chinese are applied, then we are able to get 1600 unique syllables Comment by Jennifer Haan: Word choice

The pronunciations that are close to English are numerous with many words displaying the initial sound. There are many examples of within the initial sounds such as b, p, and f among others that are similar to the English Letters. The only difference is that, from the table, English words are pronounced with a stronger health.

Both the Chinese and English languages have similar word order in their sentence structures. For instance, the two sentences that have been given below have a similar meaning when written either in Chinese or English. They march each other in terms of word by word. Comment by Jennifer Haan: Word choice

他 是 个 好 学生！ 

He is a good student! 

Both English and Chinese contain relatively very few inflections. In case there are inflections that are present, then they are relatively simple. The semantic affixes are used in both languages (Aiguo, P. 8) Comment by Jennifer Haan: Is this a quote from him? If so, it needs to be in quotation marks “…”

The Semantic affixes in Chinese.

They help in balancing words during pronunciation. They also help in indicating the plurality of the pronouns that have been used. For instance, first, the prefix plus the root: the following examples illustrate the prefix + root: Comment by Jennifer Haan: This also seems like you are getting it from somewhere and not writing it yourself. You need to put it in your own words or you need to put it in quotation marks. You don’t want to have too much quoted material, though, in your paper.

Phonetic prefix: lao hu which refers to a tiger, lao shi that means a teacher, lao zhang referring to a person, Mr. Zhang and lao hu that refers to a mouse among many others. Grammatical Prefix: Zui hao that refers to something at best, zui huai that refers to something at worst, zui da that refers to the biggest, zui jin that means recently and Zui gao which is used to refer to the highest (Aiguo, P. 9) Comment by Jennifer Haan: Good examples, but explain what they are.

Second, the root plus suffix. The phonetic prefix: examples include er zi that refers to son, mao zi that refers to a hat, pang zi which means a fat man, dian zi which refers to a proposal, and pai zi which refers to a rhythm among many others (Aiguo, P. 8) Comment by Jennifer Haan: Also good examples, but before you give them, you should explain what they are.

The semantic affixes in English

Prefixes are used in modifying the base lexical meanings. Generally, they do not alter in any way the base word-class. This involves the use of in-, il-, im- and ir- among others: For instance, this is used in words such as unfair, unusual, impossible, immature, irresistiable and illogical among others. The use of re- in words: For instance, recover, revise, reread and repeat among others. The use of semi- in words: For instance, semi-annual, semi desert and semi-metal among others. (Aiguo, P. 10)This are just a few examples illustrating on how prefixes are used in modifying the base lexical meanings. Comment by Jennifer Haan: Again…this looks like you took it straight from the source. That is plagiarism – you can’t turn in a final project with entire paragraphs taken from a source. You have to explain in your own words what is happening. That is why I encourage you to use multiple sources and not rely on one.

Suffixes: They change the base word class, however, some contain lexical meaning. For instance, use of –or, -ee, -ist. E.g. worker, driver, trainer, joker, violinist and linguist among many others. Use of –less, for instance, painless, hopeless, colorless, careless, and cheerless. Use of –man. For instance, marksman, workman, newsman and postman, and watchman among many others (Aiguo, P. 10)

Both employ the use of abbreviations: in the English language, abbreviations is a system of word formation. In the Chinese language, “Word Clipping” is a better term that can be used in denoting abbreviations. The following words provide a clear illustration how abbreviation and word clipping is done in English and Chinese languages.

Word clipping in Chinese languages: The word “Beijing University” is written in Chinese language as “Beijing dàxue” This is word clipped as “bei dàas”. Environmental protection is written in chinese language as “bei dà huan jing bao hu”. This is word clipped as huan bao. (Aiguo, P. 10).

Abbreviations in English language: it involves the use of initialism and acronyms. Initialisms are always pronounced letter after letter. For instance, British Broadcasting Company is abbreviated as BBC, Voice of America being abbreviated as VOA, United States of America being abbreviated as USA and International Olympic Committee being abbreviated as IOC among many others.

Acronyms are a bit different from initialisms because they are majorly pronounced as words as opposed to letter sequence. For instance, this can be observed in Organization of Petroleum

Differences between Chinese and English

To facilitate the written language, English uses alphabet while Chinese uses a logo graphic system. In the alphabetic system, different letters are combined to give meaningful words. In the logographic systems, the symbols that are used represents the words themselves. This major difference often make the Chinese learners have a big problem when trying to read English texts and trying to get the correct spelling of words.

Phonological difference: some of the phonemes that exist in English are not found in the Chinese language. The patterns of stress and intonation are totally different. Chinese tones language. This therefore means that Chinese language employs pitch of a phoneme sound to differentiate various words. This is contrary to English because, when pitches are used, they emphasize on emotions and not giving a word a meaning that is different on the basis of sound (A guide to learning English, Para. 3) Comment by Jennifer Haan: Missing verb

There are more vowel sounds in English language as compared to the Chinese. This leads to many faulty pronunciations of words that are closely related. Some of this words involve ship/sheep and full/fool. Also, diphthongs for instance weigh and now are always shortened into a single sound.

Often, Chinese learners are likely to experience lots of difficulties in hearing the existing major difference between l and r. therefore, they often mispronounce rice while in the actual sense they wanted to say lice. Consequently, speakers from southern region of China experience the same difficulty when it comes to distinguishing l and n. (A guide to learning English, Para. 5)

A big problem regards to the English’s common final consonant. This feature is not frequent as such in the Chinese language and make gunners unable to include the consonant or may sometimes lead to individuals adding an extra vowel that is not required. For instance, hill can be pronounced in a manner that eliminates the double ll and result in a drawn out i. The major difficulties that are experienced when it comes to pronouncing certain personal words, compounded by intonation problems lead to a type of Chinese spoken English that is highly accented (A guide to learning English, Para. 6) Comment by Jennifer Haan: ?? word choice

Adverbial modification: in the Chinese language, adverbial modification precede the main verb. When it comes to English, it is either way, they can precede the sentence’s main verb. (Lin, P.24). This is illustrated as: Comment by Jennifer Haan: instead of having headings, use a transitional phrase. “Another area where English and Chinese are different is in…” or something like that. Do that throughout the paper.

“Peter happily consumed the food”

“Peter consumed the food happily”

Grammar. Verb or tense. Much of the information in English is portrayed by employing the use of auxiliaries and inflections of a verb. This involves is/are/were among others. On the other side, the Chinese language is highly uninfected language that is able to give a meaning through the established order and adverbials. The issue of time is not addressed by employing various tenses and forms of verbs as in English. This makes the soul reason as to why most of the Chinese learners have a lot of trouble in trying to understand the English verb system complexity (Ho, Judy, and Crookall, P.238)

The following are some examples of tense mistakes that are committed: “What do you do”, this sentence has a wrong tense “I wish I am healthy” this is highly indicative instead of being subjective and “She good teacher” that has a missing copula. In most of the times, English commonly explains the meaning of the modal verbs. For instance, check on the degree of politeness in the following: “Open the window, kindly?”, “could you be able to open the window please?” There is a high level of politeness. However, a wide range of meaning is not conveyed the Chinese modals, the Chinese individuals learning not be able to use the English modals sufficiently. This may therefore see them sounding a bit peremptory when placing requests and suggestions (A guide to learning English, Para. 9)

Use of Articles. The Chinese do not use articles. This makes it hard for them to use the correct English. According to a guide to learning English, Para. 10). There are many differences in the order of words between English and the Chinese. For instance, in the Chinese, the questions are presented by intonation. Contrary to English, the subject and the verb are not in any way inverted. The post-modification of the nouns is not possible and adverbials normally precede the verbs as opposed to English that is guided by complex rules that dictate the position of such elements in a sentence.

Vocabulary. English contains numerous short verbs that are commonly combined with other particles involving the adverbs and prepositions to make phrasal verbs (Orentaub, Para. &). Example of phrase verbs include: take on, look up to among others. This type of feature that is considered lexical are not present in the Chinese language. The Chinese learners are therefore likely to experience hard times in in comprehending many texts that contain this kind of verbs and may even be tempted to avoid using them (A guide to learning English, Para. 11)

Conclusion

Through this detailed research, it is evident that there are some similarities between the two languages even though both are from different writing system. That is one employing alphabetic and the other one graphic. However, it is evident that Chinese puts more emphasize in expressions that are short and clear. This makes the listeners to easily get the accurate meaning of what is being expressed. On the other hand, English sentences are always longer because they English language needs to be specific. Also, repeated words are not omitted in Chinese language to ensure that whoever is listening gets a clear understanding of the sentence. This two just among many that have been discussed are just a perfect example illustrating how culture and philosophy are likely to pose a great influence on the language. This is because the thinking and philosophy of the Chinese is very pragmatic while English has various cultures and philosophies. Comment by Jennifer Haan: You have some good information here, but some of it is clearly taken from sources and not paraphrased in your own words. That is plagiarism. You have to make sure to put it in your own words for the final project.

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Works Cited

A guide to learning English: The differences between English and Chinese: Retrieved from: http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/chinese.htm

Aiguo, W. A Comparison of Word-formation between Chinese and English: College of Humanity and Social Sciences, Civil Aviation University of China,

Ho, Judy, and David Crookall. "Breaking with Chinese cultural traditions: Learner autonomy in English language teaching." System 23.2 (1995): 235-243 [print]

Lin, J., T. An Elementary Introduction to the Grammars of Chinese and English from a Comparative Perspective (2006).

Liang, W. Why native English speakers can learn Mandarin easily (2014): retrieved from: https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/why-native-english-speakers-can-learn- mandarin-easily

Orentaub: The Major Differences between English and Chinese (2015). Retrieved from: https://orentaub1111.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/the-major-differences-between-english- and-chinese/

Taub, O.:6 Major Differences between English and Chinese (2015): Retrieved from: http://www.digmandarin.com/6-major-differences-between-english-and-chinese.html