Differences between Chinese and English Languages-Grammar

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Languages are used to express one’s point of view and communicate with others. According to the definition of language families, Chinese belongs to hieroglyph writing and English belongs to alphabetic writing.

Nowadays China plays an increasingly significant role in world politics, economy and culture integration. Chinese languageis becoming more and more popular and important. As one of the most popular languages in the world, English have many differences between Chinese.

This is a brief introduction of the differences in Chinese and English Grammar to help those who have some basis in Chinese to learn this language easier.

1. English emphasizes on the structure, whiles Chinese focuses on the meaning. In English, several meanings can be expressed clearly with complicated structure in just one sentence. In Chinese, a sentence is usually short with little modifier, or it will cause confusion in meaning.
2. When expressing the meaning, long sentence is regularly used in English and short sentence is used in Chinese. From point one above, we could conclude that English sentences are usually long and Chinese sentences are usually short. One should “Get the meaning, forget the words” in Chinese learning.
3. It has many clauses in English sentences which are often separated in small sentences in Chinese way of expression. In an English sentence, except some modifiers, it has a lot of clauses which makes a sentence much more complicated. In Chinese, one meaning is usually expressed in separated sentences connecting with comma.
4. In English people use pronouns a lot, but in Chinese people often use noun. In English, people not only use “we”, “you”, “she”, “they”, but also use “that” and “which” to keep a sentence well structured and clearly, and avoid repeat meaning. Due to short sentence structure, a pronoun is commonly replaced by a noun in Chinese expression.
5. The passive voice is often used in English expression; In Chinese, one usually uses the active voice. The passive voice is widely used in English, especially in some scientific articles. For example, “It is (always) stressed that…” is generally expressed as “People (always) stress that…” in Chinese.