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r example, TIME Magazine once said, Nixon’s Odessey to China. Odessey was heroic epics of Homer. It described the ancient city Troy was captured, Odessey experienced a long and difficult course. If we do not have some knowledge about this, we would not understand this sentence.
3.4 Cultural Differences and Comprehension of Sentences
The way a sentence is structured reflects cultural differences. Due to cultural differences, Chinese and English sentences are different in many aspects. First of all, English, which belongs to the Indo-European family, is inflectional language; where as Chinese, as a member of the Sino-Tibetan family, is monosyllabic and non-inflectional. As a result Chinese is a topic-dominated language while English is subject-dominated language. A Chinese sentence revolves around a thought pivot, while English sentences rely on a form-pivot (or subject-predicate pivot).
Secondly, the sentences that are composed of more or less the same words may reflect quite different cultural implications. For example, only one word is different in the following two sentences, but their meanings are quite different from each other.
He is a professional.
She is a professional.
Linguistically speaking, the above sentences respectively describe his and her occupations. But from the perspectives of region, sex, occupation and society, the former sentence means that he is a professional boxer while the latter means that she is a prostitute.
Slag is also a part of culture. There is much slang in English, which are hard for Chinese students to understand as well. Here is a conversation demonstrative of the difficulties a Chinese reader might have with English slang.
A: Will you really come?
B: You kill me.
Sentence B is a slang, meaning “You can kill me if I don’t come.” In other words, I will definitely come.
Most time, there is no new word in a sentence. But we also have difficulty in understanding it. For example, “Although he corresponded with many of the world’s most important people, his stationary carried only a watermark-W-for Woolworth’s.” There is no new word and the sentence structure is also very simple. But most of us do not know the meaning of “Woolworth’s” and “W”. In fact, “Woolworth’s is a shop owned by Woolworth. The shop cells thing worth 5 cents or 10 cents. There are many Woolworth’s shop in American. And “W” means “cheap goods”.
3.5 Cultural Differences and Comprehension of Texts
Texts also reflect cultural difference. The following table illustrates the differences between English and Chinese Texts.

In English, texts are affected by thinking mode. There are logical and connecting between sentences and texts, such as time relationship, spatial relationship and so on. Linguistic forms, connection method and logical arrangements are affecting the structure of texts. It is totally different from Chinese. The following paragraph can serve as an example.
 
        (1) Being the only man in a household with my wife and three daughters is quite an experience. (2) First, I can forget about using any of the bathrooms, for   someone is always showering, blow-drying her hair, putting on makeup, or doing whatever women do behind locked doors. (3) My only hope is to get up at about 5:30 a.m. and beat them all to the bathroom. (4) Then there is the continuous woman talk abou本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。