The Comparison Between Mandarin Chinese and German
In the Book of Genesis of the Old Testament, The Tower of Babel gives generations a fantastic myth explaining why the world’s people speak different languages. As an ancient cultural asset, languages have bloomed to the amount of roughly 7,000 spread over the world nowadays after centuries when the Bible story was written down. The variety of languages sometimes causes misinterpretations; however, it creates countless diverse cultures and nourishes humans’ rich civilizations for centuries. Among myriad languages, Mandarin Chinese is mainly spoken in China and Taiwan while German is mainly used in central Europe. These two languages do not seem to have a common origin, and they can definitely be seen as divergent languages. It is almost impossible to list all linguistic distinctions between these two languages, but we still can figure out some significant ones; for instance, gender nouns, inflection in personal pronouns and verbs, question formation, and tones. These five features will be introduced one by one below.
One of the most striking distinctions between Chinese and German is that German nouns have gender while Chinese ones don’t. In German, every noun belongs to one of the three genders－masculine, feminine, and neuter. Then how do we decide the gender of the words? Sometimes, we can find clues from the word endings. Words end with er are male; heit indicates female whereas um is for neutral words. For example, Lehrer is male and Gelegenheit is female. Gender is a very important concept in German because the adjective, adverb, demonstrative pronoun, or article that precedes the noun will inflect according to the noun’s gender; using the wrong word formation may probably make your sentences confusing to native German speakers. In Chinese, by contrast, nouns do not have particular gender; we do not add extra articles before Chinese nouns to indicate the gender, and therefore, adjectives remain the original form no matter which noun follows behind. For example, no matter the tall person is a girl or a boy, the Chinese adjective for “tall” gao is suitable for both the female object and the male one without inflecting. Thus, the gender rule makes German far more complicated than Chinese. With full attention to this basic grammatical trait, German learners with Chinese background can make their learning path easier.
Besides gender, another feature that German possesses but Chinese doesn’t is the word inflection of personal pronouns. In German, personal pronouns inflect in agreement with the cases they are－nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive. For example, ich is equal to “I”, the nominative form, in English while mir and mich are respectively the indirect object and direct object form of I, which both refer to “me” in English. A German sentence will be greatly perplexing if the metamorphosis of words is neglected as we can’t clarify who the doer is and who the receiver is. How about Chinese? Thankfully, Chinese personal pronouns change forms only when they are possessive. In Chinese, wo refers to both “I” and “me”; ta refers to both “he” and “him”. And we add de after those pronouns to form possessives; hence, wo de means “my” while ta de means “his”. With the inflection of personal pronouns, people can point out clearly whether the word should be classified as a subject, possessive, or object, and further know the relation between words in a sentence. In this respect, German makes semantics clear with inflections yet Chinese users interpret semantics principally according to the texts.
Inflection also occurs in German verbs but not in the case of Chinese. Like many Latin-rooted languages, verbs in German inflect in consonance with the subject and tense; and a German verb basically has up to ten different forms. Very horrible fact, right? For example, schreiben, which means “write”, is changed to schreibe when the subject is I in present tense and schrirbst when it is you wrote. Matters are easier in Chinese, whose verb forms always remain constant no matter what the subject or tense is. Whether it is “I like”, “they once liked”, or “your cat likes”, the verb forms are all xi huan. This inflectional feature increases the complexity of German but also provides us with some clues to distinguish these two languages.
While the above discussions remain in the lexical levels, these two languages also have their unique question formation strategies. For wh- questions, German rule is similar to the English one, which is putting interrogatives in the beginning of the sentence. For example, in woher commst du, the interrogative woher, which means “where”, is placed at the first place. As opposed to the German rule, Chinese places the interrogatives at the last place in a question. The Chinese sentence Na shi she me, which literally means “that is what”, putting the interrogative she me at the last. As for yes-no questions, German puts either the verbs or the auxiliary verbs in the first place, as Kannst du sprichst Deutsch, which literally means “Can you speak German?” By contrast, Chinese forms yes-no questions by adding the interrogative ma, which is equal to “if”, at the end. For instance, Ni ai wo ma, which literally means “you love me if?” From here, we can see that one will fail to master these two languages if always following the same logic of question formation.
The fifth noticeable discrepancy between these two languages is that Chinese is categorized as a tone language though German is a non-tonal language. Tone language uses the pitch of individual vowels or syllables to contrast meanings of words; many African and Asian languages belong to this category. In Chinese, there are four main tones with a neutral tone included. For example, the same string of sounds represents ma suggests distinctive things if one says the sound with different tones. Ma with the first tone is “mother” but ma with the third tone refers to horse. Nevertheless, speaking German words with different tones can only show emotions but not to change meanings. This special quality in Mandarin Chinese is also absent in other Western languages like Spanish or Portuguese, and can raise some difficulties to Westerns learning Chinese since they have to be more careful to their speaking tones.
Because these two languages do not share the same root－German is Latin-rooted yet Chinese is Tibetan-rooted－there are of course still many other detailed distinctions left. However, we can identify at least five noteworthy differences here－gender nouns, inflection in personal pronouns and verbs, question formation, and tones. Knowing the distinctness not only helps learning languages but has a deeper insight to the wonderful variety of languages in the world. It is quite inspiring to explore the world of languages.
References
1. Ethnologue. Retrieved from https://www.ethnologue.com/about
2. Wikipedia. German language. Retrieved from https://reurl.cc/31QajR
3. Wikipedia. Chinese language. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language
4. IQ Technology. 中文拼音多字查詢. Retrieved from http://pinyin.iq-t.com/
5. Victoria, F., Robert, R. & Nina, H. (2017). An introduction to Language. Singapore: Cengage Learning, Inc.