Learn about the difference between CH and EN

 Systematical differences between two languages could cause language learners make mistakes.  A good way to improve your language ability is to spend time on this differences and figure this systematical distinction and then you would know how to avoid them in the future. Today, I am going to discuss the 4 important differences between Chinese and English. Do hope this can make your journey of Mandarin learning a little bit easier!

Tones vs Intonation

This is the first difference you should learn about the two languages, because tones are very important to Chinese but doesn’t exist in English. Chinese has 4 tones (5 if you count the silent tone), as an example, the word in pinyin ‘ma’ can have 5 different meanings depending on what tone you use. Whereas in English words are spelled based on phonics and regional accents and intonation like Chinese tones are used as an expression.

Idioms

The Chinese language loves Idioms! This is maybe because of its long history and rich culture. Sure we have them in the English language as well but they are not as widely used as in China. Idioms are used to express long messages in the least amount of characters, it’s an eloquent but fast and compact way to express a sentiment.

The

In Chinese ‘The’ just doesn’t exist. In Chinese, if you want to say ‘The most beautiful thing is love’ you would actually say ‘most important is love’.

Repetition Vs Omission

It is interesting that in China some words are repeated twice, this is often to put emphasis on the meaning of that phrase (since remember words sound similar because of tones) or your intention. An example is, thank you, if you want to add extra meaning you would say thank you twice. In English however, we omit recurrences to make the sentence structure simpler.

Chinese tends to create short and simple sentences and portray meaning in a simple and practical way, although it may not seem like it. English in comparison is like a long essay!