Please read the following article using UNICODE, as it contains a mixture of computer
encodings schemes:

So after reading "漢語和英語的比較", I can't agree more with the author on his or her
opening sentence: 學習一門語言就是學習一種思維

Very true: the whole game of mastering a language is to learn a new train of thought; or more
there is a proverb (I, unfortunate, forgot its origin): He, who doesn't MASTER a foreign lan-
guage, can't FULLY appreciate the subtleties of his native tongue.

I fully realize the author was NOT trying to write a scholarly thesis on Comparative Linguistics,
but just limiting the scope to a comparason of English and Chinese on a semi inxxxxal basis;
but this very limited scope, IMHO, is somehow preventing him/her from giving a full treatment
of a variety of language issues in the sphere of the Indo-Germanic family.

By no means here I'm trying to start a Language war (just like in CompuScience), but here are
my 2 cents by boardening the scope of discussion to include some other languages I do speak.

To begin with, here is the ideosyncracy of the English language:

I speak/you speak/we speak/he/she speaks

To the chinese ear "she speaks" is the surprise, how come the verb changes in the 3rd person
singular; but to a Russian or French ear, this is understood perfectly, but the lack of
conjugation (that is, the change of verb ending) in other cases become a surprise, because this
kind of conjugation to common to all major European languages, except for English
(of course, with the exception of he/she/it).

French way of saying /I speak/you speak, etc.

Je parle/tu parles/il parle/nous parlons/vous parlez/ils parlent

For more details on conjugation, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_conjugation

Why do all the other major Germanic languages have this "common" characteristics of
conjugation?? Just to confuse all their native speakers as well as rase their illeteracy
ratio? Of course NOT !!! All the ending changes faciliate to convey meanings. Russians
would surely be lost as to how to communicate their sentences without "bending" their nouns
and verbs, so are the Germans !

Just like in English

--I put the book on the shelf
--I have put the book on the shelf

--The job is done
--The job has been done

To the English ear, these 2 sentences convey slight different meanings (with different context).
I'm not going to bother going thru all the grammatical details about the contextual differences,
but we have to bear in mind that it's this different contextual scenario that makes you say
one sentence than the other (not the other way around, to say one sentence than the other to
convey the contextual differences, or "putting the horse before the cart"). This is just like
the 2 different answers to a very simple question in Chinese:

問: 你吃午飯了嗎？
答#1: 我沒吃午飯
答#2: 我不吃午飯

Both are in the negative, but they DO convey totally different contextual meanings, yet
both of them state the very factual thing: I didn't have any lunch. Or this pair

--兩條腿走路
--二條腿走路 (This 2nd one would be a total shock to the Chinese ear)

So after hundreds of years of evolution, the English actually became a very simplied version; among
some of the things lost in the process are (non-exhaustively): verb conjugation, Gender of noun,
cases of nouns (dative, genitive), for example,

Table (Feminine in French,une table; Masculin in Russian, стол)
Book (Masculin in French, un livre; Feminine in Russian, книга)

For a dose on cases, check it out at this URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case

So maybe here we should have Chinese learners of French, Russian and German share with us their
frustration on the above rather than whining English is so different and difficult (it is not,
it has become the most simplified one of the Germanic family). As to why all these elements
are needed in the other languages (or lack of it in English), you will have to refer to an
etymologist, of which I am certain not. But they are certainly there to convey meanings.

We should, perhaps, be glad that the English word order is mostly the same as its counterpart in Chinese,
that is Subject-Verb-Object:

--English: I gave him a book
--French: Je lui ai donné un livre
literally, I (to) him has given a book
--Russian: книгу Я ему дал
litterally: (a) book I to him gave (in Russian, the word order doesn't matter that much,
and can be said in a different order, of which, sometimes it does result in a slightly
different contextual meaning. It's the endings of nouns and verbs that matter, to determine
who gave whom what)

So on to the numbers,

--Chinese way: 1 2456 7890
--Anglicized: 1,234,567,890

Now the French way: 1,99 euro

check out this French site: http://www.pass.fr/prets-personnels/pret-tous-projets/exemples-de-financement.html

The French uses commas to mean the dot, so 1,99 euro is 1.99 euro; and uses dots to separate the thousandth; so
are many other European countries (Russian, Belgium), so now who is confusing whom??!! What Internationalized
way are we talking about here by going to the comma-separated numerical presentation?! It's an Anglicised (or
if you prefer, an Americanized way). It's just a convention, needs some getting_used_to, and that's that !!

So back to basic: to say one language is superior than another is just like trying to convince PHP programmers
that C# is the way to go or the other way around. Or trying to dictate to the Arab world that books shouldn't
be read from right-to-left.

Undeniably, English is faster and more convenient for computer input and processing (that's also why I wrote
this whole thing in English), but as far as language is concerned, as long as the meaning (and emotion) is
communicated in a mutual understandable language, any language is just as elegant as the other. Or for the
Chinese, just try get 對聯 written left-to-right instead of topdown and get a (weird) feeling for that !!