English and Chinese Language: How similar they are

The English and Chinese languages are drastically different. While English has one language, there are several different dialects in China with Mandarin being the official and overriding Chinese language. English is based on letters in the alphabet. Chinese (most Mandarin, but generally common in all of its dialects) uses a variation of pictures – not an alphabet – that doesn’t correspond sound to meaning. 

However, there are many similarities between the two languages. As a result, you may be surprised that Chinese speakers actually have an easier time learning the English language than previously imagined. Both do use vowels and consonant sounds and are related to semantics involving synonyms and antonyms. Their sentence structure is also relatively close in comparison. Also, there is the use of inflections in both languages, but there are very few of them.

While English tends to add “ed” to indicate something in the past, the Chinese language has a similar way of expressing past tense. A lot of the Chinese language deals with the four tones which provide a different meaning to the same pronunciation. English is actually somewhat similar in that there are words that can be mean something different based on the context. So learning the English language may not be so difficult and different as one can imagine.

Learning languages and are usually sensitive to Asian culture. This is their biggest advantage when learning Chinese. It is however understandable that some learners think Chinese is a difficult language. In the UK, Chinese is not the first foreign language choice, while European languages such as French, Spanish, and German are much more popular.

Chinese grammar is in many ways similar to English grammar. A simple Chinese sentence structure consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object. For example, ‘I wash my hands’ in Chinese is 我 Wo (I) 洗 xi (wash) 手 shou (hands). Chinese grammar is even simpler in some ways. For instance, the Chinese language does not have different forms based on gender, or singular/plural. There are some differences between Chinese and English, but it is not hard to trace the clue and bridge the gap.

Chinese syllables consist of three elements: initial sound, final sound, and tone. The initial sounds are consonants and the final sounds contain at least one vowel. Some syllables consist only of an initial sound or a final sound. Chinese contains 21 initial sounds, 35 final sounds with 413 possible combinations. Applying the four tones of Mandarin Chinese to this, we get a total of around 1,600 unique syllables.

A major difference between the two languages is that there are a lot of measure words in Chinese. The place and use of measure words in Chinese are similar to how the English word ‘piece’ is placed and used in the phrase ‘a piece of paper’. Although most objects (‘paper’, in this case) have their own measure words, objects of the same kind or with similar characteristics use the same measure words. For instance, 纸 zhi (paper), 报纸 baozhi (newspaper), 照片 zhaopian (photo), 画儿 huar (painting) and 邮票 youpiao (stamp) share the measure word 张 zhang (piece). Even 床 chuang (bed) uses the same measure word, ‘zhang’, because those objects all have a flat surface.

People of different cultures are living on the same earth. For most of them, the natural environment and some living conditions are similar, so there are a lot of words that have the same meaning. This shows the similarity of culture.