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The differences between

English and Chinese
Introduction: There is not one single Chinese
language, but many different versions or dialects
including Wu, Cantonese and Taiwanese. Northern
Chinese, also known as Mandarin, is the mother
tongue of about 70% of Chinese speakers and is the
accepted written language for all Chinese. Belonging
to two different language families, English and
Chinese have many significant differences. This
makes learning English a serious challenge for
Chinese native speakers.
Alphabet: Chinese does not have an alphabet but
uses a logographic system for its written language.
In logographic systems symbols represent the words
themselves - words are not made up of various
letters as in alphabetic systems. Because of this
fundamental difference, Chinese learners may have
great difficulty reading English texts and spelling
words correctly.
Phonology: Most aspects of the English
phonological system cause difficulties for Chinese
learners. Some English phonemes do not exist in
Chinese; stress and intonation patterns are different.
Unlike English, Chinese is a tone language. This
means that it uses the pitch (highness or lowness) of
a phoneme sound to distinguish word meaning. In
English, changes in pitch are used to emphasize or
express emotion, not to give a different word
meaning to the sound.
English has more vowel sounds than Chinese,
resulting in the faulty pronunciation of words like
ship/sheep, it/eat, full/fool. diphthongs such as in
weigh, now or deer are often shortened to a single
sound.

A guide to learning
English
.. all your English needs
..
A guide to learning
English
.. all your English needs
..

Chinese learners find it difficult to hear the

difference between l and r, and so may
mispronounce rake and rice as lake and lice.
Southern Chinese speakers have a similiar difficulty
in distinguishing l and n.
A major problem is with the common final
consonant in English. This feature is much less
frequent in Chinese and results in learners either
failing to produce the consonant or adding an extra
vowel at the end of the word. For example, hill may
be pronounced as if without the double ll but with a
drawn out i, or as rhyming with killer.
The difficulties of pronouncing individual English
words, compounded by problems with intonation,
result in the heavily accented English of many
Chinese learners. In some cases, even learners with
perfect grammar may be very hard to understand.
Grammar - Verb/Tense: In English much information
is carried by the use of auxiliaries and by verb
inflections: is/are/were, eat/eats/ate/eaten, etc.
Chinese, on the other hand, is an uninflected
language and conveys meaning through word order,
adverbials or shared understanding of the context.
The concept of time in Chinese is not handled
through the use of different tenses and verb forms, as
it is in English. For all these reasons it is not
surprising that Chinese learners have trouble with
the complexities of the English verb system.
Here are some typical verb/tense mistakes:
What do you do? (i.e. What are you doing?)
(wrong tense)
I will call you as soon as I will get there.
(wrong tense)
She has got married last Saturday. (wrong
tense)
She good teacher. (missing copula)
How much you pay for your car? (missing
auxiliary)
I wish I am rich. (indicative instead of
subjunctive)
English commonly expresses shades of meaning
with modal verbs. Think for example of the
increasing degree of politeness of the following
instructions:
Open the window, please.
Could you open the window, please?
Would you mind opening the window, please?

Since Chinese modals do not convey such a wide

range of meaning, Chinese learners may fail to use
English modals sufficiently. This can result in them
seeming peremptory when making requests,
suggestions, etc.
Grammar - Other: Chinese does not have articles, so
difficulties with their correct use in English are very
common.
There are various differences in word order between
Chinese and English. In Chinese, for example,
questions are conveyed by intonation; the subject
and verb are not inverted as in English. Nouns
cannot be post-modified as in English; and
adverbials usually precede verbs, unlike in English
which has complex rules governing the position of
such sentence elements. Interference from Chinese,
then, leads to the following typical problems:
When you are going home?
English is a very hard to learn language.
Next week I will return to China. (More usual
English: I will return to China next week.)
Vocabulary: English has a number of short verbs that
very commonly combine with particles (adverbs or
prepositions) to form what are known as phrasal
verbs; for example: take on, give in, make do with,
look up to. This kind of lexical feature does not exist
in Chinese. Chinese learners, therefore, may
experience serious difficulty in comprehending texts
containing such verbs and avoid attempting to use
them themselves.
View the sources of the information on this page

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 Copyright Paul Shoebottom 1996-2014

http://esl.fis.edu

Home

Grammar

Language differences

Copyright Paul Shoebottom 1996-2014

http://esl.fis.edu

Top