My Students Reflect on Chinese and English

A Common Park Past-Time:
 Older Chinese men practice
writing Chinese characters
with water on square flagstones

Practicing characters

Dave and I have struggled to learn Chinese. It is a brutally difficult language, partly because it is so different from English. When learning Spanish or German or French, there are always a few “gimme’s” – grammar structures that look familiar, cognates, even whole phrases that have been adapted by English.  

When learning Chinese, this chance for sharing doesn’t initially seem to exist.

I thus decided, last term, to ask my students—the experts – to compare the two languages in a comparison and contrast essay.  Some pointed out how much easier and more logical Chinese is compared to English.  (Ummm!  I beg to differ!)   Many identified differences.  Some found very interesting similarities.  Here is a pastiche of some of their insight.

Most recognized the central differences between the two languages.  Daisy eloquently writes: 

The study of English hangs around the neck of many Chinese students, especially English majors who are forced to have a good command of it. Under the deep influences of the local customs and habits, we have difficulty in readily mastering this foreign language. While English and Chinese are both languages using to convey our thoughts, they belong to different language families. Hence, they are far cry from each other, varying vastly from sentence structures, pronunciation characteristics to verb tenses.

Others found some similarities in the vast differences.  Vikki writes:

At first glance, the English and Chinese languages are drastically different. Chinese and English are from different families of languages and cultures. Chinese characters have more complicated formations than English words. They are widely divergent in writing, sentence structure and vocabulary. But magically, I found many similarities between these two languages — their great influences on the world, their characteristics of tolerance and expansibility and many interlinked idioms.

Margo agrees that despite the initial differences

As two of the most popular and worldwide languages, Chinese and English, have a lot in common. For example, they are both universal languages and working languages of the United Nations. They both have a long history and are highly respected by their speakers. Yet, because of different environments and cultures, they have pretty significant differences in font, writing, grammar and pronunciation.

Nancy jumped right in to point out central differences between Chinese and English, saying “English pays more attention on the sentence’s structure while Chinese is liable to focus on meaning.“

(I kind of feel the same way about Chinese.   I spend all of my time trying to figure out the structure, and so by the time I get to meaning, I’m spent.)   My response to her was:  hopefully, both English and Chinese strive for meaning!  She adds:

 Language is closely related to culture…  Taking different responses towards compliments into consideration, Chinese people are accustomed to regarding modesty as a traditional virtue,  hence they accept others compliments with modest attitude, while, English people are more active and they will express their feelings frankly and directly.’ 

That is an interesting way to approach language difference. Embedded in this observation, you can see how she is actually exploring how  language reflects the culture.  An example of how Chinese language reflects politeness came up in my class when I was teaching Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior.   In the novel, Kingston, who is a combination of the fictional Chinese hero, Mulan and her actual American immigrant self, meets her teachers who invite her to eat.  She is conflicted by her Chinese- American qualities:

“Have you eaten rice today, little girl?” they greeted me.

“Yes, I have,” I said out of politeness. “Thank you.”

(“No, I haven’t,” I would have said in real life, mad at the Chinese for lying so much.  “I’m starved. Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies.”)”

Chi fan le ma?  is a common Chinese greeting: Have you eaten rice?  The proper Chinese response is chi-le or, yes, I’ve eaten.  The more common American response is Hell, no! Give me some cookies.  

Other students pointed out differences that were surprising – even to me.  Lucy for example taught me things about English that I never realized:

Firstly, long sentences are frequently used in English, while short sentences are common in Chinese. For example, when we describe some details in English, we are likely to use subordinate clauses to modify the sentences, including the adverbial clauses of place, condition, cause and result. But in Chinese, we usually use several adjectives to modify the subjects. And to make the sentence concise and lively, we need to avoid the long and complex sentences.

Secondly, there is a lot of passive voice in English, while more active voice in Chinese.

Nancy also makes this point:

English pays more attention on the sentence’s structure while Chinese is liable to focus on meaning; English sentences are always long and cumbersome while Chinese sentences are more concise and clearer. We even sometimes need to guess what an English sentence means, for they use too many abstract words, which are hard to comprehend. 

And finally Margo:

The differences also exist in writing. Chinese people are used to writing short sentences and express meanings in several sentences. While English people don’t like sentences that are too concise. They prefer using conjunctions or clauses to express their meanings at a time, with a pretty long sentence.

With these lines, I can hear a thousand English teachers throughout the land weeping in unison.  Hemingway, with his short and concise sentences, raises his head  from his grave with all sorts of questions when he hears these insights.  We spend all our time trying to get our students to write clear and concise sentences.  We, English teachers, preach:  avoid the passive sentence structures. I suppose, because conjunctions and subordinate clauses are unusual constructs in Chinese, the teachers spend a lot of time teaching them.  But, to play my direct and American self:  Hell no!   Don’t use those long crazy conjunction-laden comma-spliced sentences!    My more polite, maybe Chinese (?) self instead  said to all of them were:  “Actually, good writing in English should be short and to-the-point too.”

Lucy ends pointing out: 

Last, English pays attention to the change, while Chinese focuses on repetition. For example, to avoid the stiff structures and pale expressions, in English, we usually choose some synonyms and flexible sentence structures. In contrast, in Chinese, the repetition is a typical writing techniques to stress and highlight the theme. Therefore, it is common to find that the same words or the similar structures are used more than once.

This is an interesting insight, although I’ll have to take her word for it.  English does indeed strive for variety.

Some other differences that the students pointed out:

(Margo) “As for the font, Chinese characters are also called “Square characters” because of their neat, normative fonts. Besides, each Chinese character has its own meaning. Take “天” for example, it means “sky” in Chinese. More interestingly, when the characters combine with others, it will have a totally different meaning. “天” combines with “气” means “weather”. While in English people use combinations of letters to express meanings, a single letter does not mean anything. But in this way, only 26 letters is enough to express everything. That is more flexible than millions of Chinese characters.”

This is definitely the beauty and difficulty in learning Chinese.  You can’t look at a character that you don’t know and phonetically use it to figure out its meaning.   In fact, if it is sitting next to another character, it shape-shifts into something different. Thus, memorizing characters is just part of the game. You also have to read and learn how they’re used.

Margo also talks about the differences in sentence structure:

(Margo)  “English often cuts to the chase at the beginning, showing the results first and then discussing the facts later. That is also called the front focus. Chinese is used to expressing things step by step, from facts to conclusions.  That is also called the back focus.

She also focuses on the fact that objects rather than subjects can begin sentences: 

English can choose words that cannot perform actions or are inanimate. In contrast, Chinese is generally more accustomed to … active things or living objects to be subjects. For example, “A wave of cigar smoke accompanied Tom in.” is the meaning of 汤姆进门时带来一缕雪茄烟雾。 In Chinese, the proper word order is “Tom brought a wisp of cigar smoke when he entered the door.”

Daisy too talks about how sentence structure in the two languages is very different:

Chinese and English differ in their sentence structures. In general, in English, one sentence should and can contain only one verb. That is to say, two verbs cannot be linked by a comma. Instead, they should be separated by a period. If you want to add more verbs into  sentences, you should turn them into absolute construction or non-predicative verbs. You can also put them into compound or subordinate clauses. This is the basic principal of English grammar. However, in Chinese, it’s much more casual. You can use as many verbs as you like. There are no specific rules to limit the verb use. This is also a formidable challenge for throngs of foreigners learning Chinese.

Oh yeah, baby, preach it.  That sentence structure of piling on verbs is where I get lost when I’m trying to buy something at the market, and the verbs begin flowing from the shop-keeper’s mouth.   Daisy also brings up another really big difficulty that I’ve found in learning Chinese (and my students struggle with in English) – the use of verb tenses.   Daisy writes:

Finally, the verb tenses often puzzle people in those two different cultures. In English, the tense can be clearly reflected in the verb itself. It has formal and various conjugation of verbs to express different time and states. Under different circumstances, the English can use different verb tenses to remind people of the exact time. However, in Chinese, we don’t have inflection of verbs to show the time and state. Although we have some adverbial structures to prompt the time, we still don’t have explicit and distinct conception of “tense.” That’s the reason why it’s so mind-boggling for foreigners to understand Chinese when we are talking about things that happened in the past.

This too is the truth.   When talking about the past, there are a few ways that Chinese helps the hapless foreigner.  Time markers always go at the beginning:  “Yesterday I eat…” “Last year I go…”   There is also this very puzzling construction of shià de and finally there is the le construction.  Putting “le” at the end of the sentence can sometimes mean that it happened in the past.  But not always!

Those are all of the traps set to catch the unsuspecting foreigner.   And, indeed, in Daisy’s words, it is sometimes mind-boggling.

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However, my students didn’t just stress the differences.  They found significant similarities between the two languages.  Vikki points out that they are both universal languages:

English is the largest language by number of speakers, and the third most-spoken native language in the world. English becomes an indispensable bridge for cross cultural communication. Two people from different cultural backgrounds mostly communicate with each other in English. When I made friends with Russian students, we spoke English. When I worked as volunteer at a job fair, international students asked me for help in English. When I learn French, I use English to help me understand better. All is about English. We just cannot live without English.

Similarly, Chinese is the largest language by number of native speakers. Chinese words and pronunciations were imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. Although we do not know Japanese at all, we can still roughly understand a sentence in Japanese. With rapid development of China, more and more countries start to attach importance to Chinese language education. And more and more international students come to China and learn Chinese.

She also taught me that both languages are “expandable”:

Vikki: The reason why these two languages have such enormous influence is they both have the most enduring quality of tolerance and expansibility. 29% of English vocabulary is from Latin; 29% is from French and 26% is from Germanic language. Words like "typhoon", "lychee" and "mahjong" are all English words that came from Chinese. There are also many loanwords in Chinese, such as "champagne" from French, "caffè" from Italian and "cola" or "golf" from English.

Vikki then speaks of Pinyan—the use of western letters to help render Chinese characters into something foreigners can pronounce:

 The most significant borrowing (of Chinese) from English is Pinyin, which is for transliterating Chinese using 25 English letters. … The invention of Pinyin makes it much easier to learn Chinese and links two languages together because English is a language of phonics….

Finally, Vikki introduced me to similar idioms from the two countries:

As far as we know, the main ideas of Chinese and English culture are rather different, sometimes are opposite. But I find many interlinked idioms in two languages. In Chinese, we have exactly same idioms as "Blood is thicker than water. ","Walls have ears. ","Fire and water have no mercy, "and "Spend money like water. " In the Chinese version of the idiom "When the cat is away, the mice will play. " is "When the tiger is away, the monkey will replace it as the king". There are just too many examples so I couldn’t mention them all.

Their conclusions are heartwarming.  Daisy is pragmatic in pointing out the importance of knowing the two languages:

Both English and Chinese are official languages of the United Nations. If you want to participate in the international organizations, having a great grasp of both these two languages is of vital importance. What’s more, only after we clearly understand the differences between different languages, we can learn them more quickly, more easily and more effectively.

 Margo sees something even bigger – peace and friendship:  

Language is the carrier of culture. Language, with culture, geography, history, politics and  economy blend together. These ideas react to the language in an all-pervasive way, leaving a deep cultural imprint on the language. We English major students cannot be satisfied with only knowing our mother tongue. Only when Chinese and English stand shoulder to shoulder and communicate with each other can we learn these two languages well and truly understand the differences and connections between these two languages.

And finally, Vikki sees beauty and hope in bilingualism:

The diversity of languages and cultures makes the world colorful and brilliant. While all languages can find some common ground from others. It feels like we are members of the global village and we are all neighbors. These language similarities provide us with prerequisites to communicate with each other and draw lessons from other languages and cultures. Maybe this is the key to the constant development of human civilization.

Wendy diligently practices her characters

I completely agree.  From my students, I have learned that learning Chinese and teaching Chinese students English has played a role in helping me expand my world view.   Correcting their long English sentences, and encourage short concise thought, has helped me identify my own cultural biases.  I’ve learned that learning a language goes beyond memorizing sentence structure, vocabulary words and characters.    It involves also learning something about how another group of people think.   Thus, if learning Chinese takes a long time, I shouldn’t be surprised.  It is a chance to learn about other people who live on our planet. That always should be deliberative, thoughtful, enjoyable and finally the means to the end rather than just the end itself!

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Here are some difficulties in translating Chinese into English:

I've admired this sign in our local department store.   We're warned of several things:
Beware your shoes
Do not trample the yellow line
Do not be out of the elevator
and my personal favorite:
Be careful chothes sandwich

In this park, they desperately did not
want us to go near the water:  Do not Dabble!

That didn't sound quite write, so down the
path it was switched to:  Do not Paddle!

Warning signs are often times places
where you see the translator anxious to be clear.
Here, he uses both synonyms to be sure:
Warning drop (fall)

Finally  this priceless offering;
free wifeless Internet  
(perfect for the single man in your life!)