Spoken in People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Malaysia, Singapore.
The written language
Mandarin is the dialect that forms the basis of the standard written language, uniting the many dialects of spoken Chinese, which can be as different from each other as French and Italian are. The examples in this section refer to Mandarin.
Mandarin uses compact ideographs, not an alphabetic script, so readers are used to processing more information with a shorter eye span. One and a half lines of a Chinese text might require more than ten or fifteen lines when translated idiomatically into English.
Sentence structure and word order
- No difference between word order in statements and questions:
*When they will arrive? (When will they arrive?) 34b.
- Subject can be omitted: *Is raining. (It is raining.) 62a.
- Very little inversion of subject and verb: *She is leaving and so
I am. (She is leaving and so am I.) 34b.
- Conjunctions occur in pairs: *Although she is rich, but she wears
simple clothes. (She is rich, but she wears simple clothes.) 62e.
- An adjective phrase precedes the noun it modifies: *He gave me a
too difficult for me book. (He gave me a book that is too difficult
for me.) 62b.
- No equivalents of be or have auxiliaries: *He is be able. (He is able.) 41c, 61a
Nouns and pronouns
- Nouns do not have plural forms: *He has three sister. (He has
three sisters.) 58a, 60a
- Pronouns can be dropped (he, she, and it have the
same sound), and no distinction is made between subject and object
forms: *He stored furniture. (He stored his furniture.) *I gave the
forms to she. (I gave the forms to her.) 44a.
- A noun will often have the same form as an adjective: *She is very
beauty woman. (She is a very beautiful woman.) 45.
Verbs and verbals
- Chinese has no inflections for singular and plural, tense, or verb
form. Most words in Chinese have just one form, often just one
syllable, so changes reflecting number, tense, part of speech, or
agreement cause difficulty: *The house was painting last month. (The
house was painted last month.) *The singer have a big band. (The
singer has a big band.) *When he had a job on Wall Street, he walk to
work. (When he had a job on Wall Street, he walked to work.) 42,
43.
- Little differentiation between a base form, an -ing form,
and a past participle: *I was very confusing. (I was very confused.)
*They decided moving to Baltimore. (They decided to move to
Baltimore.) 61c–61f.
- In Chinese, an adjective can include the sense of the verb
be, so the form of be is frequently omitted in English:
*She always cheerful. (She is always cheerful.) 38c, 41c, 45c.
- No equivalent of auxiliaries be or have: *I am be
able. (I am able.) 41c, 61a.
Adjectives and adverbs- Adjectives such as easy, hard, and difficult apply
to how a person feels, not only to the nature of the task: *I am easy
to program a computer. (I find it easy to program a computer.)
64e.
Articles- No articles in Chinese: *I bought book. (I bought a book.)
60.
