Is Mandarin More Efficient than English?
From my personal experience and understanding, Mandarin has a higher efficiency in delivering meanings than English. As a college student in the United States, I am always in a situation where I need to tell the exact same story in two different language, one in my native tongue Mandarin, and the other one in my third language English. As a result, I realized an interesting difference between them. The story in English would be longer. I would need a lot of redundant words to express my feelings.
The experience of telling two types of same story leads me to think what are the causes of such difference. An idea hit me in the first place and that is English has only twenty-six characters, unlike there are thousands of characters in Mandarin. Also, each Mandarin character has meaning, which does not apply to English characters. Only words in English have meaning and thus combination of the twenty-six characters are used to deliver meaning. With such complexity in composing meaningful words, English is, in fact, less efficiency.
As I did some further research, another striking fact catched my attention and that is a professor in English needs to keep memorizing vocabularies, but a professor in Chinese do not do such things after high school. The reason being is not there is no new words in Mandarin. There are always new vocabularies being creating everyday for every languages. The crucial point creating the difference is that Mandarin uses two or several meaningful characters to create a new concept and each character has its own meaning relate to the new concept.This is a huge advantage over English in the aspect of efficiency. For example, the picture below shows the words with the same meaning in English and Mandarin. All the words in Mandarin compose of only two characters. However, the length of the English version of the words vary. In addition, each of the characters in Mandarin words has its own meaning relates to the words, unlike English that each character does not mean anything on it own.
Furthermore, with a better efficiency in delivering meanings, reading in Mandarin is easier and faster than reading in English. For instance, I can get a essense meaning of a whole paragraph in a single glance. However, reading a paragraph of English at one glance does not acheive such effect. I infer the reason behind that due to the fact that English paragraph is composed of twenty-six letters, while Mandarin paragraph has district words that represent different meanings.
In overall, I would say that Mandarin sentence focuses on the meaning where English sentence, on the other hand, emphasizes the structure. As a result of this, English sentence can be arranged in a way that it is super hard to understand but with all the words understandable. English has a much heavy emphasis on tenses and grammar too. As for Mandarin sentences, one do not need to consider the structure that much to interpret the appropriate meaning of it. There is no tense, sex, number, lattice, deformation, never to say the combination of them in Mandarin. Concisesness may be a advantage of Mandarin over English, but one can still not conclude that English is less developed. The two languages each represents their own culture and philosophy. The question of “will Mandarin replace English as the future of language” is often brought up. For me, the question is meaningless. They all have their own importance and significant. I can only conclude that Mandarin is more efficient in terms of communication and sentence comprehension.
