Terms/Facts for Today TERM Pinyin: Developed in China in the 1950s, Pinyin is a Romanization system used to learn Mandarin. It transcribes the sounds of Mandarin using the western (Roman) alphabet. Pinyin is most commonly used in Mainland China for teaching school children to read and it is also widely used in teaching materials designed for Westerners who wish to learn Mandarin. FACT: Know five grammatical differences between Chinese and English relevant for translation (courtesy of Prof. John Webster)

#1: Where English has inflections for pronouns, Chinese has none. English uses different pronoun forms, depending on whether the pronoun is in a subject or object position. We don’t say “You love I.” Rather, we use the objective form of the first person pronoun “I”, which is “me,” as in “You love me.” In Chinese, by contrast, the forms of the pronouns do not change—not here, not anywhere. Where English uses both “I,” and “me,” depending on context, Chinese uses just plain “wo.”

#2: Where English has inflections for number, Chinese has none. When English speakers talk about something in the plural, we have a plural form: for most English nouns we add either “s” or “-es.” Thus I can buy one book, or two book-s, one watch or two watch-es. Chinese by contrast has no plural endings. A Chinese speaker can specify a number, but the noun intended to be understood as plural will still retain the same form it had in the singular.

#3: English has multiple inflections for verbs. Chinese has none. Chinese has no verbal endings—like the “-ed” and “-en” English uses to indicate the past tense, or the “-s” we use with third person present tense singular verbs, as in “she play-s.” Instead, to indicate time Chinese speakers use adverbs. Thus they say “I love you” for the present, and “Some years ago I love you” for the past. And there are no gerundive or participial forms in Chinese either. So Chinese speakers use just the one word ai (love) per verb where English uses five: love, loved, loves, loving and to love—the infinitive form.

#4: Chinese has no articles corresponding to the English words “a,” “an,” or “the.” Three of the most common words in English are “a,” “an,” and “the.” But as with verb and number forms, Chinese has no counterparts for them.

#5: In spoken Chinese the same word is used for “he” and “she,” while English uses two different words (plus their inflected object forms: him, and her). In spoken Chinese both “he” and “she” are represented by the same word, “ta.” This, obviously, is very different from English. In Chinese you keep gender straight not by using different pronouns but simply by paying attention to context.