English vs.Mandarin
Imagining that there’s a world without languages, what will happen? I guess that the world will definitely be full of wars and conflicts, because human beings cannot communicate with others. That’s why languages are such essential achievements of civilization. The top two most- spoken languages nowadays in the world are Mandarin Chinese and English. The former has 1.1 billion speakers and the latter has 983 million speakers. Many pPeople in worlds are desired to learn both Mandarin and English, . Analyzing the differences between them can help us learn languages easily. We can differentiate English from Mandarin for based on three characteristics:, writing systems, orders of names, and culture backgrounds.
To begin with, English, consists of 26 letters, is an alphabetic language while Chinese is a logographic language. English speakers can spell millions of vocabulary from A to Z. For an English learner, they just have to memorize 26 upper and lower forms of alphabet, then they can memorize English words as more many as possible. On the other hand, if a Mandarin learner can memorize 26 words, it may be hard to have greetings. Because Chinese is a logographic language, each word has its own characters. There are more than 20,000 Chinese characters; however, if you can recognize about 3,000 words, you can read the news smoothly. Due to the fact that Mandarin is not an alphabetic language, it’s challenging for a non-native speaker to learn hundreds of words, which increases the difficulty of learning Chinese. Therefore, the distinctive ways to write the words show obvious difference between two languages.
Besides the spelling of words, the orders of name represent that Chinese put focus on “family”, whereas Westerns focus on self-independence. For example, Chinese name are composed of three words, including “surname + given name”. In the contrast, Western names consist of “given game + surname”. The different orders show that Chinese tends to put their families first. In ancient times, they lived in “三合院”, a place that the whole family lived together. On the other hand, Westerns emphasize the importance of independence so they move out of their original home to build a new family. In conclusion, Chinese put their surname first and they are family-based, in contrast, the Western put their given name first and they appreciate self-independence.
Next to the order of names, two languages are affected by different cultural backgrounds, English culture are mainly influenced by Christianity, whereas Chinese culture by Confucianism. Christianity, the biggest religion in Western society, advocating that everyone has a common father —Jesus Christ. Hence, they believe that everyone is equal, which lead to they don’t focus on hierarchical relationships and terms of respect. In contrast, Confucianism, focus on relationships between human beings, deeply affected Chinese culture for more than two thousand years. There are five cardinal relationships in Confucianism: ruler-minister, father-son, husband-wife, elder-younger, friend-friend. Thus, Chinese use terms of respect and considered it a kind of basic manner. Hence, the culture backgrounds, Christianity and Confucianism, greatly influence two languages.
To summarize, there are three major differences between English and Mandarin. Firstly, the writing systems, alphabetic and logographic, represent two languages in different ways; also, the orders of name indicate Chinese put first priority on family, while the Western self-growth; the last, the different backgrounds, Christianity and Confucianism, have profoundly impact on English and Mandarin. Because both languages are the most-spoken languages nowadays, it’s important that we are aware of the knowledge and backgrounds between them.