There is not one single Chinese language, but many different versions or dialects including Wu, Cantonese and Taiwanese. Northern Chinese, also known as Mandarin, is the mother tongue of about 70% of Chinese speakers and is the accepted written language for all Chinese. Belonging to two different language families, learn English and learn Chinese have many significant differences. This makes learning English a serious challenge for Chinese native speakers.
Chinese does not have an alphabet but uses a logographic system for its written language. In logographic systems symbols represent the words themselves - words are not made up of various letters as in alphabetic systems in Chinese courses. Because of this fundamental difference, Chinese learners may have great difficulty reading English texts and spelling words correctly.
Most aspects of the English phonological system cause difficulties for Chinese learners. Some English phonemes do not exist in learn Chinese; stress and intonation patterns are different. Unlike English, Chinese is a tone language. This means that it uses the pitch (highness or lowness) of a phoneme sound to distinguish word meaning in Chinese classes. In English, changes in pitch are used to emphasize or express emotion, not to give a different word meaning to the sound.
English has more vowel sounds than Chinese, resulting in the faulty pronunciation of words like ship/sheep, it/eat, full/fool. Dip thongs such as in weigh, now or deer are often shortened to a single sound on learn Chinese.
The difficulties of pronouncing individual English words, compounded by problems with intonation, result in the heavily accented English of many Chinese learners. In some cases, in Chinese courses 4seven learners with perfect grammar may be very hard to understand..
There are various differences in word order between Chinese and English. In Chinese, for example, questions are conveyed by intonation; the subject and verb are not inverted as in English. In Chinese classes, 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 sentence elements. Interference from Chinese, then, leads to the following typical problems.
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