The biggest and most difficult seperation to overcome between England and China is that of language. The English speak English, the Chinese collectively have around 8000 different local dialects, which are generally grouped into 8 real different languages but the majority speak either Cantonese and/or Mandarin. Here the comparsion will be between English and Mandarin.
The observant and logical thinking reader will have noticed this English artical may have some bias. This is possibly unavoidable, but an attempt to be fair will still be made.
The English language has an alphabet of 26 letters. Knowledge of these 26 letters then makes every word readable, even if the meaning is unclear. For example the word "Wiswo", currently meaningless, but most English speaking readers will have pronounced it in a similar manner.
How do you pronounce "爱"？The reader either knows or does not. Even a Chinese individual who knows every other Chinese character except this one (a very poor individual indeed, since everyone should have someone to 爱) cannot know how to pronounce this.
There are over 60,000 Chinese characters, although only around 6,000 are used and known by the majority of educated Chinese speakers. Thats around 230 times more things to learn than in English. Written English clearly has the advantage.
What of spoken?
Chinese is a tonal language. The meaning of each syllable can change depending on the tone. "Ma" and "Ma" mean "horse" and "mother", depending on the tone. This tonal aspect is often of great difficultly for an individual not used to such a language, but it would be a huge bias to announce it inferior. It is simply different.
Mandarin has far less spoken syllables than English. Ignoring the tones it has around 400, including the tones it has around 1000. English has around 12,000 possible ones. So, clearly Mandarin wins on spoken and the round ends in a draw.
Well... no.
Mandarin has around 1000 possible syllables. Yet it has around 6,000 commonly used characters, each representing a syllable, each with a different meaning. This means that, on average, every spoken syllable, even if the tone is flawless, has 6 possible different meanings. Put 3 syllables together and unless familar enough with the language to imediately recognise it's meaning, a mental search of 216 possible combinations needs to be carried out.
Although possibly still being baised, the equaliser is scored.
England 3 - 3 China
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