What's the difference between English and Chinese?

Answer 1

Chinese isn't really a language. It's a group of languages with Mandarin being the most widely used. I will refer to it as Chinese for the sake of practicality :)

- Unlike all European languages. Chinese is not inflected or declined. Ie, there are no different verb endings, and you would say "he" the same way you would say "him".

- In speech, personal pronouns are not differentiated between male and female. You just have to figure it out in context.

- Chinese makes heavy use of special one syllable articles such as the interrogative article "ma" in the language. You may also hear Chinese saying 'la" or "ah" at the end of a sentence. That indicates tone and mood.

- English (and other European languages) are stress timed languages. E.g. with the word "language" you would stress like "LANG-guage". In English, sometimes by altering the stress onto a different syllable you can change a verb into a noun, or vice versa. In Chinese, there's no such thing. In Chinese, each syllable has 4 tones a neutral tone. Some people get confused about what this means. If you've played the piano, each key represents a different tone. You just modulate your tone when speaking. It's absolutely vital to get the tone right, or else you will be saying something completely different to what you intended. Other tone based languages can be found in Africa. Swedish is sometimes said to be a borderline tonal language - but it's nothing like Chinese.

- There is no official alphabet even though there are many spelling systems such as Pinyin. There are thousands of characters, each representing a sound. They are not really ideographs or pictographs, as they are often attributed as. You don't look at a character and think of the story it's trying to tell you, because there is none.

- There are no articles i.e "a" or "the" in Chinese. In Chinese, if you want to say , "there is a car over there", you would just say "there is ONE car over there".

-Geographically Chinese is a very centered language. English is ubiquitous.

- There are no plurals in Chinese. To say "look at those cars" you would just say "look at those car" . The plural is implied.

-Also note that Chinese is similar to English in that it too uses the SVO sentence structure. SVO stands for Subject-Verb-Object order. This is in contrast to SOV languages such as German and Dutch.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

Differences Between Chinese And English

Answer 3

1

Answer 4

These languages are 'worlds apart'. Chinese languages, including the main one Mandarin, are tone languages whereas English is not. They are not in the same language family, but are totally separate family, totally unrelated. English is agglutinative i.e. uses affixes, Mandarin is isolating therefore no affixing - English words can be very long compared to Mandarin words being only one or 2 syllables long. All English sentences must have a verb, Chinese doesn't have to, especially stative sentences. There are no determiners or plurals in Mandarin, and no tense.

They use totally different writing systems: English uses an alphabet, Mandarin uses pictograms/characters.

Answer 5

There aren't alphabets in the Chinese language like there are in English. Chinese uses chinese characters to compose their words. There are over 20,000 characters. In English, words are read left to right. In Chinese, it's top to bottom. Also, when Chinese is spoken, pronunciation is crucial because if you pronounce a word differently, it could either no make sense or mean a different word. For example, "ma" in Chinese can mean mom or horse depending how you pronounce it.

Answer 6

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Yes, I can. A piece of cake. But this question does not make sense, because I can understand at least one, English, already. Likewise if you learn/understand Japanese a bit, it is easy to distinguish them by both reading and listening, because Japanese have Hiragana which looks like more rounded as the writing, and Chinese sounds are more rash. On the other hand, if both two languages are unfamiliar or both have unfamiliar letters, it will be much more difficult for me. For instance, it was hard for me to say by text or speaking which is Catalan and Spanish when I went to Barcelona, though now I have got some tips to tell the difference. Also, because I cannot read Cyrillic writing, impossible to say the difference among the those languages with the characters. Similarly Arabic letters.

Answer 7

there are many languages in Chinese. The most common used is Pu Tung Hua, or known in English as Mandarin language.

1. english has alphabets. each chinese letter si symbolized after something.
2. there's no intonation in english. in chinese, the same spelling could be pronounced in 5 different intonations and they mean differently.
3. to learn english, it's enough that you know all the 26 alphabets and start writing and memorizing words. to learn chinese, you gotta memorize approx 10.000 words with 10.000 different symbols (there are basic strokes though)
4. english is easy; chinese is damn difficult and complicated!

Answer 8

There is no Chinese. Mandarin is the official national language of China. The difference between Mandarin and English is that Mandarin rests on intonation whereas English does not.

Answer 9

i think the difference is most of the Chinese can speak English, but only very few native speaker of English can speak Chinese

Answer 10

Cantonese and Mandarin have similar sentence structures and are regarded to be of the the same family of languages, and is classified as: Sino-Tibetan, Chinese
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=China

In Chinese verbs, nouns and adjectives never change endings. When you ask a question in Chinese you present both alternatives. Thus, "Do you want any?" becomes "Do you want, not want?" And if you answer yes, you say "I want." If you answer no, you say "I not want."

English is classified as: Indo-European, Germanic, West, English
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=US

English and Chinese are totally unrelated languages. Though I believe that some English words have entered everyday Chinese vocabulary. The word of salad is "sha la" Coke a Cola is "kuh luh" coffee is "ka fei" Bus is "ba see"