国名教育The differences between English and Chine
Introduction: There is not one single Chine language, but many different versions or dialects including Wu, Cantone and Taiwane. Northern Chine, also known as Mandarin, is the mother tongue of about 70% of Chine speakers and is the accepted written language for all Chine. Belonging to two different language families, English and Chine have many significant differences. This makes learning English a rious challenge for Chine native speakers.
kaiteAlphabet: Chine does not have an alphabet but us a logographic system for its written language. In logographic systems symbols reprent the words themlves - words are not made up of various letters as in alphabetic systems. Becau of this fundamental difference, Chine learners may have great difficulty reading English texts and spelling words correctly.
Phonology: Most aspects of the English phonological system cau difficulties for Chine learners. Some English phonemes do not exist in Chine; stress and intonation patterns ar
e different. Unlike English, Chine is a tone language. This means that it us the pitch (highness or lowness) of a phoneme sound to distinguish word meaning. In English, changes in pitch are ud to emphasize or express emotion, not to give a different word meaning to the sound.
English has more vowel sounds than Chine, resulting in the faulty pronunciation of words like ship/sheep, it/eat, full/fool. Dipthongs such as in weigh, now or deer are often shortened to a single sound.
Chine learners find it difficult to hear the difference between l and r, and so may mispronounce rake and rice as lake and lice. A major problem is with the common final consonant in English. This feature is much less frequent in Chine and results in learners either failing to produce the consonant or adding an extra vowel at the end of the word. For example, hillwhatisthematter may be pronounced as if without the double llclap什么意思英语 but with a drawn out i, or as rhyming with killer.
The difficulties of pronouncing individual English words, compounded by problems with in
peerlesstonation, result in the heavily accented English of many Chine learners. In some cas, even learners with perfect grammar may be very hard to understand.
Grammar - Verb/Ten: In English much information is carried by the u of auxiliaries and by verb inflections: 东道国is/are/were, eat/eats/ate/eaten, etc. Chine, 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 Chine is not handled through the u of different tens and verb forms, as it is in English. For all the reasons it is not surprising that Chine learners have trouble with the complexities of the English verb system.
Here are some typical verb/ten mistakes:
∙ What do you do? (i.e. What are you doing?) (wrong ten)
∙ I will call you as soon as I will get there. (wrong ten) vitality
steal的过去分词∙ She has got married last Saturday. (wrong ten)
cour∙ She good teacher. (missing copula)
∙ How much you pay for your car? (missing auxiliary)
killman∙ I wish I am rich. (indicative instead of subjunctive)
English commonly express shades of meaning with modal verbs. Think for example of the increasing degree of politeness of the following instructions:
∙ Open the window, plea.
∙ Could you open the window, plea?
∙ Would you mind opening the window, plea?
Since Chine modals do not convey such a wide range of meaning, Chine learners may fail to u English modals sufficiently. This can result in them eming peremptory when making requests, suggestions, etc.
Grammar - Other: Chine does not have articles, so difficulties with their correct u in English are very common.
There are various differences in word order between Chine and English. In Chine, 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 ntence elements. Interference from Chine, 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 Chine. Chine learners, therefore, may experience rious difficulty in comprehending texts containing such verbs and avoid attempting to u them themlves.
