Sunday, October 21, 2007

Chinese Grammar(中文语法) vs. English Grammar

I should tell Alicia that this is a perfect comparison essay topic~ : )
English, Chinese, these two languages are quite different. Chinese has special writing style, it has no related to the English letters such as, A B C and D~ On the other hand, the grammar in Chinese, has many similarities with English, such as the sentence structures, like: S+ V+O; "I love you"= "我(I)爱(love)你(you)"Subject always comes first. However in our daily life, we will change the order of the sentence's element. Sometimes we will say some sentence put our subject in the back of the sentence, it's only used for speaking, it is not allow to write something with this structure. "干什么呢你(you)"="What are you doing?"In this case"you"should before "doing", but we put it back to the last one. For the words part, in English, we have to put "ed" after a verb if it is past, but in Chinese, there are some words which can show if it is past or present, there is no difference between the words and the structure you used. When you see those words, they emphasize the time the things happen, for the main sentence, it will never change even if its past, present or future.
Explain those things are quite difficult, I found that I made myself feel confused about Chinese.. I cannot give you enough Chinese examples because the words are different, you cannot recognise what did I write, I hope you can get those the explaination I gave you. Those points I mentioned are the biggest difference between Chinese and English.
In conclusion, Chinese has less standard on sentence structures and the changes for words. However, most people say that English is much easier than Chinese. Oh, maybe because that Chinese pronounciation and the large amount of words.
At last, I want to say, I will try my best on my English grammar, I can do it! Believe me, Niki~~~~ :P

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm so happy that you'll try your best. I believe you can do well if you put your mind to it. Your explanation of Chinese grammar was great. I saved the characters for "I love you" in a document because they are very pretty in Chinese. Linguists consider Chinese and English to be hard for non native speakers because of the reason you mentioned for Chinese, and for English, there are just so many exceptions and odd phrasal verbs. (That's my guess.) :)