There are many differences between Chinese and English consonants, which can be summarized as follow.
1 Aspirated sounds are common in Chinese, which are not found in English consonant system. There are only four voiced consonants in Chinese-/m/ /n/ /ng/ and /r/-while many voiced consonants in English are paired with voiceless consonants.
2 In Chinese, there is no palatal sound but retroflex, which is the opposite in English.
3 There are more frications in English and more affrications in Chinese. It seems that English spatial shape tends to be more stable and gentle, while Chinese spatial shape is more complex and changeable.
It should be noted that the same phonetic symbols do not mean that they have the same spatial form in the two language systems. For example, /j/ and /h/ represent two completely different sets of spaces. Whether the sounds are the same cannot be confirmed by the name, but the spatial diagram.
The difference between vowels is even greater. It can be said that there is almost no identical set of spaces except for a few vowels like /e/ /i/ /ə/ and /u/. The combination of the diphthongs is also different in two languages. In Chinese, the nasal consonants is placed behind the vowel to form a phoneme. In the vowel system, the change of Chinese space is more flexible and abundant, and the frequent change of tongue position makes the spatial form more dynamic.
In Chinese,tone is also indispensable to describe a pronunciation because it can determine the meaning of a word.As shown in the figures,the pitch of tone is divided into five grade,corresponding to five colors.
In English,different stress positions will affect the words meaning.Take word ‘record’ for example,it will have different meaning according to say as /ˈrekɔːd/ or /rɪˈkɔːd/.Word stress can be translated into the change of wall thickness.