Chinese in Plain English

Chinese is made up of 405 basic syllables, many of which have different tonal pronunciations, for a total of some 1,277 “building blocks.” At first glance, this large number of syllables and building blocks makes Chinese appear extraordinarily complex. By comparison, the English language has only 44 basic sounds. But those 44 sounds are used to make up several thousand syllables, and, in that sense, English is far more complicated than Chinese.



The Chinese syllabic alphabet is made up of combinations of 5 vowel sounds, 15 compound vowels (combinations of the five basic sounds), and 23 consonants (21 if you discount “y” and “w” which the Chinese consider variations of “i” and “u”). These are combined in sound patterns what are repeated over and over making the learning and pronunciation of the 405 syllables much less formidable than they might first appear.

Grammatically, Chinese is easier than English. The sentence order is generally subject, verb, object just as it is in English; and adjectives come before nouns just as they do in English. But, in Chinese, there are no plurals, no articles (a, or an), and no verb conjugations.

Source: De Mente, Boye Lafayette. Chinese in Plain English. Chicago : Passport Books.