“Award” and “reward” have similar meanings. They both can be different parts of speech-nouns and verbs. They are something you get for your behaviour, but there are major differences. Let’s look more deeply at each word.

“An award” is a noun. It is something valuable that is given, like a prize, to someone for their accomplishments. “Awards” are usually given by someone to someone else. As a verb, “award” means to give someone something, like a prize or money, for an accomplishment. Look at the following sentences: The students received an award from the teacher for not missing any school days. The judges awarded first place to the dance group.

In the area of law, “award” has slightly different meanings. As a verb, “award” means to give an official judgment (判决) of an amount or sum of money. As a noun, “award” is the amount of money the court or judge decides. Look at the following sentences: The judges awarded money to the victims (受害者). The award totaled 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s move on to “reward”. “A reward” is a benefit given to someone in exchange for a certain behaviour or action. “Reward” as a verb means to give someone a prize for their actions or behaviour. Look at the following sentences: The reward for all the students passing the test was an ice cream party. I rewarded my cat with some fish after he did a trick.

Remember, “award” is based on accomplishments. And “reward” is based on behaviours or actions.

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Last week, our forum(论坛)asked if you had any funny or strange stories about using English. We didn’t expect to get so many posts! Here are some of our favorites, to remind us that some of the English we learn in the classroom is rather different from the English in the outside world.

Learning Chinese could be one of the most important decisions you have ever made. Chinese is becoming the language to learn in the 21st century. With the world’s largest population and a rapidly growing middle class, China stands to become the engine of the world’s economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries, or for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history.

There is an ongoing effort to modernize the writing system and standardize the language. An increasing number of people learning Chinese are learning Mandarin, so unless you absolutely need to learn another dialect, such as Cantonese, be sure you are studying Mandarin.

For native English speakers Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn. The vocabulary is wholly unfamiliar and unlike anything we know. In addition, in the Chinese tone system, words are spoken in rising or falling tones, which help to distinguish between them. Furthermore, there is the Chinese writing system-a collection of thousands of individual ideograms (表意文字), or symbols, which represent a word or an idea. These ideograms have no phonetic (音标的) value — that is to say, we can’t tell how the word is pronounced by how it is written. There is a method to present written Chinese in a phonetic script called Pinyin. If you are learning Chinese, you’ll be working with this Pinyin system, but the beauty of the traditional writing system shouldn’t be passed up. All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us. Yet, for a determined learner, there’s always a way to overcome it.