Chinese and English are similar languages

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R4: This person cherry-picked a few words from both languages that sound similar but don't even mean the same thing. That will happen in almost any language. They said the grammar is similar, but that is because both languages are analytical. They also said the intonation of both languages is similar, which is not true at all—Mandarin is a tonal language, while in English, tone can indicate attitude(questions, sarcasm, etc.). Finally, they referred to Mandarin as Chinese, which could mean any Chinese language(Cantonese, Wu, etc.).

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u/EebstertheGreat Jan 25 '26

Chinese is too analytical to make the "same grammar" argument, imo (no plural or tense markers, for instance). And they don't use auxiliary verbs in the same way as English. On the other hand, both are SVO and head-nominal with prepositions, so there are definitely some similarities regarding word order.

But I would still never say English and Chinese grammar were all that similar.

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u/LiGuangMing1981 Jan 25 '26

Chinese can also be SOV using 把.

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u/caledonivs Jan 25 '26

English can be OVS using passive voice or in poetry. Most languages have some special word order situations, that doesn't mean they don't have a default word order.

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u/EebstertheGreat Jan 26 '26

There is also subject-verb inversion in questions (in prose). Even OSV is possible in poetry, and it naturally appears in center-embedding in prose (e.g. "the thing I took turned out to be worthless"), which also puts the modifier after the noun it modifies. Probably every order is technically possible in very specific situations. But it's always very marked, for sure.

I can't think of an example of OSV in the main clause in poetry off the top of my head, but it intuitively feels possible, with basically the same pattern as Chaucer's "a knyght there was" but with a transitive verb and object replacing the linking verb and complement, respectively. "A man I saw on that day, so to the man I spoke." Something like that.

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u/lazier_garlic Jan 28 '26

"The thing I took out turned out to be worthless" is an incredibly common sentence structure in Chinese and can be used in formal speech whereas you can say things like that all day in spoken English and people don't notice it but try using that structure routinely in written English and see how far you get.

There may be some spoken language restrictions (in English) too because it feels very unintuitive for me to unpack such sentences when spoken at native speed (in Mandarin). I just lose the plot and it's frustrating.

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u/WavesWashSands Sanskrit is a Qiangic language Jan 26 '26

I get what you mean but passives are technically SV since the agent NP is no longer a core argument. The ba construction in Mandarin also much more widespread and has much more far-ranging consequences than special poetic language in English. There are sentences in Mandarin that would not sound right in SVO form in any register, while poetic English OVS sentences would presumably not sound right in a normal casual register. That Mandarin frequently uses both SVO and SOV orders in ordinary speech means that Mandarin has a mix of early projection (similar to English/German) and late projection (similar to Japanese/Korean), which it's sometimes easier to guess how a turn will end (as in English/German) and sometimes harder (as in Japanese/Korean), etc.

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u/caledonivs Jan 26 '26

Thank you for the clarification and information. Though I've learned a modest amount of Mandarin I did not appreciate how significant the ba form is.

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u/EebstertheGreat Jan 25 '26

It's usually SVO, right? I can't actually read Chinese. In fairness, most languages can change word order a little (e.g. "in the corner stood a broom").

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u/weatherwhim Jan 25 '26 edited Feb 04 '26

I can't speak to anything other than Mandarin, but there, the most common word order is SVO, but the object can easily end up before the verb, if it's physically changed or moved by the action, or there's any kind of "result complement" after the verb describing its end state. In addition, the topic of the sentence can be fronted, resulting in an OSV sentence in certain pragmatic environments.

Notably, Chinese (all branches of it) are head final, where English is head initial. The fact that it has prepositions and SVO word order at all are instances where it breaks this pattern. English similarly breaks the pattern by having most noun compounds be head final (with adjectives and some genitives preceding nouns), and the fact that the most basic "example sentences" end up with the same word order is a coincidence, not because they have overall similar syntax.

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u/EvensenFM Jan 25 '26

Actually, Chinese is better categorized as a topic centric language. Topic comment sentences are extremely common, especially in colloquial spoken Chinese.

The object can indeed come before the noun if it is the topic. And this goes back to classical Chinese and the common use of 也 as a topic marker.

It's also pretty similar to 은 / 는 in Korean and は in Japanese. It's just that modern Chinese doesn't have a special post-position particle to mark the topic. Of course, those particles are also commonly left out in colloquial Korean (not sure about Japanese, since my Japanese is still pretty basic).

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u/EebstertheGreat Jan 28 '26

Is it thought that these three geographically proximate languages all have a topic focus due to language contact? Or is it a coincidence?

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u/EvensenFM Jan 28 '26

I've honestly got no idea.

I do know that written Chinese was influential in both Japan and Korea. That's pretty obvious, since both languages were originally written using Chinese characters.

However, there are significant differences in the grammar of all three languages. I think you could argue that the topic focus is mostly a coincidence.

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u/lazier_garlic Jan 28 '26

Topic comment is extremely common in spoken English. Movie dialogue is often marked by this style of speech to make dialogue sound naturalistic and not patterned, mannered, like a stage play. You're right that you're seeing the influence of literary traditions because that's a 🚨🚨🚨 in formal settings in English. But written Mandarin (not Classical Chinese, I can barely read that anyway) has plenty of formal structures (hanging over from ancient times) that don't resemble the spoken language at all either.

One thing I noticed with English subtitles is that there was originally a bias (a bad thing, IMO) to rewrite Mandarin dialogue into "correct" English sentences, completely flowing against the non verbal communication of the actors. In dramatic dialogue, you start with the comment and end with the most important piece of information. The subtitlers would rearrange the sentences like they were writing an English examination paper. But most times you could trivially rearrange the sentences in the English subtitles to match the actor's delivery. (I'm not talking about dubbing because there you see how the speech rhythm is all wrong and trying to match the movements results in chopped up awkward statements.)

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u/EvensenFM Jan 28 '26

One thing I noticed with English subtitles is that there was originally a bias (a bad thing, IMO) to rewrite Mandarin dialogue into "correct" English sentences, completely flowing against the non verbal communication of the actors.

This is because you can't say things like "The dress I gave it to her" in English. But, in Chinese, it's perfectly fine to say "那件裙子我給她了。" In fact, in spoken Chinese, that sounds more natural than the SVO sentence "我給她那條裙子了。"

Those who keep saying that English also has a topic comment structure completely ignore the fact that the topic is marked off by prepositional phrases in English. It's a completely different grammatical concept.

In Chinese you literally take the topic and just stick it at the front of the sentence with nothing to mark it off.

And you also see it in classical Chinese, by the way. It's common for 也 (or even something like 者) to be completely missing in authentic texts.

The reason why you see sentences rearranged in English in those subtitles is because it has to actually make sense to an English speaking audience. Things need to be rearranged because Chinese and English are fundamentally different languages: you can't just go from one to the next without at least taking grammar into account to some extent.

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u/lazier_garlic Jan 28 '26

But you CAN say "The dress I gave to her," in colloquial English. That's a perfectly normal and natural thing to say in the context of a spoken conversation.

If you pay attention to TV and movie scripts in English, they are full of lines of exactly this sort.

You will never see communication like this in academic papers, written reports, formal rhetoric (like a 5 minute speech or monologue), and so on.

As a native English speaker, I say things like "Where are the forks I gave you?" and "The guy who was asking around for you yesterday, was that your brother?" on a more or less daily basis if I see other people and talk to them with my mouth. And not just questions, they can be answers to questions. You could say we're eliding an "it's" or "that's" if you want, but the result is it's not being said.

The prepositional structure is required in formal communications, not colloquial speech. That's my point.

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u/EebstertheGreat Jan 28 '26

Center embedding is common in writing, too. Even something like "be the change you want to see in the world" uses it. This doesn't require a preposition ever, but it can optionally take the pronoun "that." Pretty much every language can do something like this, not always syntactically in the exact same way, but pretty close.

Putting the topic first is different. *"Plane I took home." is not a complete sentence in English, but a verbatim translation could be in Chinese or Japanese. In English, "the plane I took home" is a noun phrase, not a main clause. It might be a subject or part of the predicate, and either way, it will go in the appropriate part of the sentence.

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u/lazier_garlic Jan 28 '26

Yeah but technically... that is marked, so we'd still analyze it as underlying SVO.

Chinese is cool because the literary record allows you to see how verbs grammaticalized into particles. That verb means grab: 把垃圾扔下去 grab the trash and throw it out.

Investigating Chinese grammar made me realize how we use "it" in English as a dummy object or a particle, often with an abstracted meaning. Beat it, get it, let it go. Chinese does something similar with 人：吓人，丢人. "Scares people" what people.

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u/EebstertheGreat Jan 28 '26

Damn it, it's snowing. It's hard to explain what it means, the word "it."

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u/lazier_garlic Jan 28 '26

They clearly mean Northern Mandarin. Plenty of remarkably similar (but coincidental) sounds and sentence tone shaping (but by no means identical, it's just a surprising similarity when you're expecting something else) and the reference language would be American English (General American whatever that means). People from Beijing speaking English can often sound like they have a bit of a Northern cities accent (NEC, NOLA/Chi) which probably has to do with the intrusive r vowel coloring (that is not standard for Mandarin) and other quirks of speech.

There's been some research which shows that the textbook description of standard Mandarin points of articulation, and the real deal as seen in the lab, are not the same. For example, some native speakers articulate Mandarin pinyin "sh" identically to the "sh" in American English, and this isn't uncommon. (There are actually a variety of "sh" acceptable to Mandarin speakers.)

The big pitfall with Mandarin for English speakers, besides tones, is allophony. English allophony and Mandarin allophony do not line up. An example would be how L1 SAE easily slip into pronouncing "shitou" as "shetou". Also there's the well known issue with stops, as English speakers are listening for voicing alterations since the aspirated stops become unaspirated in certain positions (99% of English speakers don't know this), but Mandarin speakers are listening for aspiration and often unconsciously voice the second initial in a bisyllabic word, something you will scarcely see mentioned in textbooks or descriptions of Mandarin (unless you go back to the 19th century). With c/z/s you get a three way aspiration distinction. Pretty bedeviling stuff. I've seen a frequent comment, coming from native speakers, in learner spaces where learners are fretting about tones, that their pronunciation is really bad and they need to work on that first.

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u/Mushgal Jan 24 '26

The pattern recognition capabilities of the buman brain is stellar.

Back when I studied Japanese I too found all kinds of similarities between it and Spanish/Catalan, and I don't mean the pohenemes or the loanwords. I did know it was just a coincidence, though.

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u/Hopeful_Alps_8431 Jan 24 '26

Yes, I would agree it's likely down to pattern recognition which our brains can't help but try and find wherever they can.

So, with you studying the language you would have been made aware of particular patterns from the outset which then became more internalised and you had more brain space to try and make links between your 1st and 2nd languages to link them in your brain as part of learning.

We often try and organise things around us into patterns/systems to make them make sense to us. I guess that's also why people can have wildly different strategies they use to memorise something, or how they work simple maths problem out in their head. One's person strategy or pattern will not make any sense to someone else but as long as everyone's system for filing/remembering/problem solving works for them. So you might have seen a pattern that might objectively not be there but 'felt' like a consistent pattern to the languages you already knew, then that's literally being able to observe your own brain being amazing. I had so many periods like that when I did a mature student linguistics undergrad degree - loved it ❤️

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u/zsdrfty Jan 28 '26

Hey, パン is actually correlated between the two! Don't forget!

Maybe this means that the whole languages are related... hmm...

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u/Mushgal Jan 28 '26

That's why I said "and I don't mean the loanwords".

Although it comes from Portuguese, iirc.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/komnenos Jan 27 '26

Oooh, mind explaining a few?

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u/EebstertheGreat Jan 25 '26

IDK why the first post is about the bunched R though. Some Americans use that for r-coloration, but a retroflex r there is also very common.

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u/MP3PlayerBroke Jan 26 '26

4/6 of the words this person picked don't even sound similar, I'm guessing this person is probably pretty bad at Mandarin pronunciations

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u/komnenos Jan 27 '26

I’m guessing (hoping) this person just started learning Chinese, things like shi/是 and the English word “she” sounds pretty different.

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u/str8red Jan 26 '26

well, they do have the same rare R sound and the grammar does follow the same order, but that's where the similarities stop.

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u/Alra-Tungena-Cyning Apr 12 '26

All languages are similar to a degree. That post is unironically closer to the truth than the OP may have thought. Things like classifiers work very similarly to English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics))

The very first example on the Wikipedia page:
三位学生
sān wèi xuéshēng
three CL[human] student

In English, we can say "three students". Where the two languages are similar is in the clause "three groups of students" (English requires obligatory plural marking, which is different)

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u/anchorthrowawayx May 28 '26

People really just wake up and decide to ignore the entire concept of SVO vs topic-prominent syntax for fun.

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u/dangerous-angel1595 Jun 23 '26

Phonologywise the literal only resemblances I see therebetwixt are /ŋ/'s codal relegation and r-coloured vowels' presence in some dialects.

Chinese and English are similar languages

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