A Comparison of Chinese and French Language Structures

Abstract

The comparative study of two languages can have many angles, such as phonetic comparison, lexical comparison, semantic comparison, grammatical comparison and so on. Chinese and French are commonly used languages in the United Nations. Among them, French belongs to the Latin language family and is an independent language of the Romance language family of the European Indo-European language family; Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and is one of the oldest scripts in the world with a history of more than 6,000 years. Among them, French belongs to phonograms, and Chinese belongs to ideograms, which means that there are big differences in the syntactic structure of the two languages. The author studied French systematically at the undergraduate level. When I first came into contact with the French language, the most intuitive feeling was the difference between pronunciation and vocabulary. This paper discusses the structural and phonetic differences between Chinese and French from five aspects: phonetics, inverse linearity and forward linearity, meaning and form, the concept of aspect, and subject and object.