2。2 Contrast of Thinking Modes of Chinese and English

Because of the differences of all kinds of culture, there are different characters in their value and worldview system。 The typical representation are Chinese and English culture which always have conflicts in the communication of modern society。 People shaped their own philosophic and universal views with the evolution and development of history, in which process Chinese people insisted the unity between Man and Nature while western people stuck to the opinion of the pidedness between Man and Nature。 These two different opinions play a significant role in the formation of Chinese and western people’s thinking modes。

Chinese people tend to use entire and comprehensive thinking mode more frequently under the influence of their own worldview and pay more attention to the intuitive awareness, while western people choose to use analytical and logical thinking mode。 So the concepts of “field-dependence and field-independence” are often used by many scholars to make contrastive analysis on the difference of thinking modes between Chinese and English people。

Here are some differences summarized by Jia Yuxin。 The first one is entire and comprehensive way and analytical logical way。 When Chinese people make consideration, they will form a thinking process from the whole to the part, from the large to the small, which is contrary to western people’s liner-thinking mode。 And the second one is the specific and abstract thinking mode。 Chinese people always use the form of analogy, metaphor, symbol and so on, which will make their thinking process more specific and imaginal。 However, in the form of judgment, concepts and inference, abstract thinking process tend to be more logic, deductive and analytic。 

Generally speaking, western people’s thinking mode has the characteristic of analytic and liner way, especially in English。 They usually put the topic at the beginning of an article and complete the article by using the expressions that conform to their own language habits。So in their articles, conclusion is more important than illustration。 However, Chinese people usually focus on the “Parataxis” when constructing a discourse and the cohesion in the article is not so close as in English。 All of these differences arise from different thinking modes。

Ⅲ。 Comparison between English and Chinese Thinking Modes文献综述

    When making some consideration or illustration, Chinese people tend to use imaginal, general, reverse and object thinking modes, while Western people always have their own thinking modes which are abstract, logical, forward and ontological。 The following is the detailed explanation of those differences。

3。1 Abstract Thinking and Imaginal Thinking

    Western cultural thinking modes have a strong abstraction, usually using the thinking modes of conceptualization, judgment and reasoning。 But Chinese imaginal thinking is more developed and practical and grasps the law of the object of cognition with the help of intuition。 These two different ways of thinking directly response to the use of sentence and vocabulary, and the performance is that English people use a large number of abstract nouns to express the concept of reality, e。g。

    (1) A nation cannot prosper long when the market favors only the prosperous。

    当市场只偏爱有钱人时, 国家就无法永续繁荣。

    (2) I can never replay her many kindness to me 。

我无法回报他对我的许多帮助。

(3) I decided that the only course of action was to pay a visit to your store。

我决定去看看你的商店。

    If above sentences are translated literally, these abstract nouns prosperous, kindness,course will be difficult for Chinese readers who are accustomed to imaginal thinking to understand, giving people a feeling of “virtual” and “hidden”。 However, for American and British readers who are accustomed to abstract thinking, this expression is explicit in meaning and concise in word。