English for Chinese

When I learned English thirty plus years ago in China, we were taught to say "I shall", "we shall", and "you will...

Many English dictionaries published in China use /i/ and /u/ symbols to represent the sounds /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ respectively. As a result, some lea...

Steve Kaufmann is an undisputed celebrity in the language study community. According to Wikipedia , "[a]s of 2023, he has an understan...

According to Wikipedia , 42% of world languages follow the subject-verb-object (SVO) order, and 45% follow the SOV order. In a Facebook gro...

* 作时间副词的“最近”：recently（或lately）仅用于过去。一个较常见的错误是将表示“不远将来”的“最近”也译为recently，此时正确的用词是soon、in the near future、甚至now、currently等，或不译，如“我最近在搬家”（Curre...

The debate in China about keeping or dropping English as a mandatory course in middle school and high school has been going on for at least...

安倍晋三遇刺身亡，美国田纳西议员Steve Cohen 称 刺杀行为是a dastardly act，日本首相岸田文雄对刺杀行为的 说法 被英译为dastardly and barbaric。英语词dastardly不很常用，它兼有“怯懦”和“邪恶”的意思，似乎没有合适的汉语词...

In my last posting , I said "成年后学外语，口音几乎不可能完全消除，略带外国口音不是坏事，但如果华人希望更好地与人交流、或从政、或跻身公司高层，减少口音即使不是必须的，也是有益的。它需要仔细听、模仿、学习，和长时间不懈的努力" (...

以前讲过中国学生或华人 最容易读错的英语字母N ，应读/ɛn/，但中国人读作/n/，或/ɛ/变得很弱。这里讲几个容易读错的词： * southern：它的第一音节元音是/ʌ/（即cut的元音），不是/aʊ/，虽然south中的元音是/aʊ/。的确有词典说加拿大或苏格兰方言有...

Apart from onomatopoeias, borrowed or transliterated words, or cognates [note], what are some English and Chinese words that happen to have...