Comparison between written English and written Chinese

Historical civilizations of the Near East, China, and Central America used some form of logographic writing systems.

Since a purely logographic script would be impractical, a subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is then used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In both Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of fusing such phonetic elements with determinatives; such "radical (Chinese character)|radical and phonetic" characters make up the bulk of the script, and both languages relegated simple transliterations to the spelling of foreign loan words and words from non-standard dialects.

Written Chinese (Chinese: 中文) comprises the symbols commonly known as Chinese characters or sinograph (漢字), and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated. The Chinese writing system is logosyllabic; that is, each character generally represents either a complete one-syllable word  or a single-syllable part of a word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation.

English, an alphabet-based language, is a West Germanic language that developed in England and south-eastern Scotland during the History of Anglo-Saxon England. English has become the lingua franca in many parts of the world, and the most prominent language in international business and science. It is used extensively as a second language and as an official language in the European Union and many Commonwealth of Nations|Commonwealth countries, as well as many international organisations.

Greek and Chinese
Professor Eric A. Havelock, in his essay Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet, stated that the Chinese script systems, fundamentally a logographic and syllabic combined system, require users to memorize  thousands of "characters", which take on a visual of their own interposed between sound and vision. Havelock concluded that the existence of thousands of Chinese sinographs "violated the principle that the 'sighting' of symbols should be reduced to the minimum possible interruption in the transfer backwards of visual memory to acoustic memory." Havelock noted that Chinese calligraphy drains the user's energy by demanding mastery over an elabolate system of visual patterns. Unlike alphabet users, the users of Chinese logosyllabary system would be restricted from "enlarging the original oral-acoustic range of meaning in spoken language, as acoustic memory was triggered by looking at a limited set of recurring objects on paper", since a large amount of brain power is being diverted into the storing and the retrieval of the thousands of sinographs.

Havelock stated that based on evolutionary research, language is associated with acoustics at a biological level, and relates to sharing information with fellow human beings through speech via different dialects of whatever language groups. The universal acceptance, and dominance of the written Chinese scripts may be the reason why China is lacking a spoken "Lingua franca", which in turn has caused misunderstanding with other cultures.

English and Chinese dictionaries
Image:Writing systems worldwide.png|400px|thumb|left| Dozens of indexing schemes have been created for arranging Chinese characters in Chinese dictionary|Chinese dictionaries. The great majority of these schemes have appeared in only a single dictionary; only one such system has achieved truly widespread use - the system of Radical (Chinese character)|radicals.

Chinese character dictionaries often allow users to locate entries in several different ways. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries of Chinese characters list characters in radical order: characters are grouped together by radical, and radicals containing fewer stroke (Chinese character)|strokes come before radicals containing more strokes. Under each radical, characters are listed by their total number of strokes. It is often also possible to search for characters by sound, using pinyin (in Chinese dictionaries), bopomofo|zhuyin (in Taiwanese dictionaries), kana (in Japanese dictionaries) or hangul (in Korean dictionaries). Most dictionaries also allow searches by total number of strokes, and individual dictionaries often allow other search methods as well.

Another dictionary system is the four corner method, where characters are classified according to the "shape" of each of the four corners.

Most modern Chinese dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries sold to English speakers use the traditional radical-based character index in a front section, while the body arranges the main character entries alphabetically according to their pinyin spelling. To find a character whose corresponding sound one does not know using one of these dictionaries, the reader finds the radical and stroke number of the character, as before, and locates the character in the radical index. The character's entry will have the character's pronunciation in pinyin written down; the reader then turns to the main dictionary section and looks up the pinyin spelling alphabetically.

Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Chinese literature|Literature at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States, in his essay titled "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese" expressed his frustration over the everyday usage of Chinese dictionaries.

Professor Mair wrote that his colleagues in Chinese studies consult their dictionaries much less frequently than experts in similar fields. Only individuals with exceptional determination, fortitude, and stamina are capable of returning again and again to the search of difficult characters. Mair went on to search for the reasons why Western Sinology lags behind Indology, Greek Studies, Latin Studies and Arabic Studies, and concluded that because it is too difficult and time-consuming for Chinese study scholars to use Chinese dictionaries, and these difficulties could be easily avoided by creating an alphabetically arranged dictionary.

Loanwords from Japanese language
After the Meiji Restoration, many modern Japanese words were integrated into Chinese language:
 * Politic (政治)
 * Economic (经济)
 * Philosophy (哲学)
 * Thought (思想)
 * Freedom (自由)
 * Democracy (民主)
 * Abstract (抽象)
 * Karaoki (卡拉 OK)

Loanwords from English language
Chinese had begun to use English loanwards about 100 years ago:
 * Taxi (的士)
 * Salad (沙拉)
 * Coke or Cola (可乐)
 * Coffee (咖啡)
 * Bus (巴士)
 * Cartoon (卡通)
 * Boycott (杯葛)
 * International (英特納雄奈：國際)
 * Petite bourgeoisie（小布爾喬亞：小資產階級）
 * Bolshevik (布爾什維克)
 * Democracy (德謨克拉西)
 * Anarchism (安那其：無政府主義)
 * Gentlemen (尖頭鰻：紳士)
 * Utopia   (烏托邦)
 * Benz     (奔馳)
 * Hacker   (黑客)

Creation of new words
English writing system creates new words everyday: Chinglish, Shanghai, email. twit (from Twitter), blog, blogosphere, GFW.....

New age Chinese words

 * SB......Chinese swear word.
 * TMD.....Chinese swear word.
 * MZ......Short for Min Zhu=Pinyin for Democracy.
 * ZF......Short for Zheng Fu=Pinyin for Government.
 * LZ......Short for Luo Zhu=Pinyin for blog owner.(樓主)
 * GDP.....Gross domestic product:(国内生产总值=鸡的屁)
 * .CN.....Internet China Domain (中国域名)
 * Netizen.........(冈民)
 * IP......IP address.(IP 地址)
 * Gmail...........(网址)
 * Google..........Google
 * Google.cn.......Google in China(谷歌)
 * ISP......Internet service provider
 * Web 2.0..........Web 2.0

Phrases with opposite meaning

 * "You are wicked" = you are fun
 * "I love you to death" = 爱死你了