Will learning Chinese affect my English?       

No way, learning Chinese will not affect your English! Learning a second language can be hard at times. And , there is no defined research on how learning is going to affect other languages known by you, for example, ‘English’. 

So, in this blog, we are going to discuss some important points on how the Italian language is related to English and make it clear that learning Chinese is not going to affect your English.

Before going into details let me have a quick introduction about the Chinese language.

The development of spoken Chinese from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China’s plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China favoured linguistic diversity. Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the Qing dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthoepy academies (simplified Chinese: 正音书院; traditional Chinese: 正音書院; pinyin: Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the Qing capital Beijing’s standard, but had little success.

English and Chinese have a lot of words that look and sound the same.

Words that look the same from one language to another are called cognates. There are many cognates in English and Chinese. 

In my opinion, the greatest similarity is that they’re both analytic languages. In other words, they both rely more on word order and helper words like prepositions to establish relations between words rather than inflection. English has more in common with Chinese in this respect than a lot of the languages it’s related to.

However, there are many similarities between the two languages. As a result, you may be surprised that Chinese speakers actually have an easier time learning the English language than previously imagined.

Both do use vowels and consonant sounds and are related to semantics involving synonyms and antonyms. This sentence structure is also relatively close in comparison. 

Also, there is the use of inflections in both languages, but there are very few of them. While English tends to add ed to indicate something in the past, the Chinese language has a similar way of expressing past tense.

A lot of the Chinese language deals with the four tones which provide different meanings to the same pronunciation. English is actually somewhat similar in that there are words that can mean something different based on the context. 

So learning Chinese will not affect your English language. 

Is there any more similarities between Chinese and English 

Chinese syllables consist of three elements: initial sound, final sound and tone. The initial sounds are consonants and the final sounds contain at least one vowel. Some syllables consist only of an initial sound or a final sound. Chinese contains 21 initial sounds, 35 final sounds with 413 possible combinations. Applying the four tones of Mandarin Chinese to this, we get a total of around 1,600 unique syllables.

Don’t be scared if you’ve planned to work on these. Take a look at the pronunciation which is close to English. Within initial sounds there are many examples to list. “b”, “p”, “m”, “f” are almost the same as English letters except with stronger exhalation. Since the vowel “a” is widely used to pronounce “Ah” let’s try a few combinations: “b”+ “a”= “ba”. If you don’t notice the tones it sounds exactly the same as “Ba” refers to father. The same is to “ma”.

Here’s another one: “sh” and “ch” are both easy ones for English speakers. Remember the sounds of wash and church? Try “cha” with help of “Charles”.

There are plenty of more cases like this which certainly save a lot of work during learning Chinese Mandarin. Don’t feel under pressure to start your learning as English would help and you’ll have fun.

From the above points, you must have a clear idea of how learning Chinese can be fun and it is not going to affect your English, as these two languages have totally different ways of grammar and pronunciation. So, you can start learning the Chinese language without any hesitation after reading this article. Also, let me share with you an amazing learning platform from which you can start learning. It is called Multibhashi and it has both website and app learning facilities as well!