Insights from Chapter 5 of A Handbook of Chinglish

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After studying Chapter 5 of A Handbook of Chinglish, I have gained a more profound and systematic understanding of English expressions, and I have benefited a great deal.

This chapter focuses on the common redundancy issues in Chinglish. In Chinese thinking, to emphasize content or express comprehensiveness, we are accustomed to piling up a large number of modifiers and repetitive expressions. For example, sentences like “in the near future time” and “make an improvement in” may be written. The word “future” already contains the concept of “time”, and “make” is an unnecessary collocation in “make an improvement”. The correct and concise expressions should be “in the near future” and “improve”. Through the analysis of a wealth of example sentences in the book, I realized that English pursues conciseness and clarity. Excessive and unnecessary words not only make sentences long and complex but also easily interfere with the transmission of the core message, resulting in unidiomatic expressions.

This makes me reflect on my previous English learning and writing. In the past, I often fell into the misunderstanding that “more words mean richer expressions”. I thought that adding a large number of modifiers would make my articles more wonderful, but I ignored the language habits of English. Now I understand that conciseness and accuracy are the keys to English expression. In my daily study, I have started to deliberately pay attention to the expressions of native English speakers and imitate them to convey accurate information with the most concise words. For instance, “I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to...” can be simplified to “I thank...”, and the latter is more straightforward and powerful.

In addition, this chapter also reminds me that when translating and writing, I should not correspond words directly from Chinese. Chinese and English have different language logics and cultural backgrounds, and direct translation often leads to Chinglish. We need to have an in-depth understanding of the grammatical structures, collocations of words, and idiomatic usages in English and reorganize the language from the perspective of English thinking.

After studying Chapter 5, I pay more attention to conciseness and accuracy in my English expressions. In the future, I will continue to strengthen my reading and practice, keep cultivating English thinking, reduce the occurrence of Chinglish, and improve my English proficiency to make my English expressions more idiomatic and fluent.