This Wikipedia article on
Topic-Prominent Language mentions the topic-prominent nature of Chinese.
They tend to downplay the role of the passive voice, if a passive construction exists at all, since the main idea of passivization is to turn an object into a subject in languages where the subject is understood to be the topic by default.
That's definitely true for Chinese. 被 is often described in English-medium Chinese grammar books as the Chinese passive marker, equivalent to "by". However, this does not mean that a translation from English into Chinese has to use this all the time.
The pencil is dropped by Elizabeth. is passive voice.
The pencil is dropped. is still passive voice.
铅笔被我丢了。
[The] pencil is lost by me. Note that the English language forces the speaker to include an article. Also, note that 丢 here is translated as passive voice, because the English way of topicalization is through passivation.
Pencil by me lost. would be ungrammatical in English.
And finally, note that 被 here is translated as the preposition, "by".
铅笔丢了。
[The] pencil is lost.
They usually do not have expletives or "dummy subjects" (pleonastic pronouns) like English it in It's raining.
Unconsciously, most, if not all, bilinguals may experience something called linguistic interference. The linguistic interference may be L1>L2 or L2>L1. I experience both. Too often, I have to substitute English words in an otherwise Chinese conversation. But there was one time when my English side of my brain was activated and thought what I said sounded weird.
Outside is snowing. 外面下雪了。At first glance, it seemed to make sense to me. But after taking it to monolinguals, I began to realize that it's really the dummy It. A proper translation for 外面下雪了 would be "Outside, it's snowing." But the word order might be somewhat marked, so the unmarked word order would be "It's snowing outside."
They often have sentences with so-called "double subjects", actually a topic plus a subject.
Refer to the article for examples.
They do not have articles, which are another way of indicating old vs. new information.
I can definitely attest to this. There was a time when I played around in LingoDeer, learning Korean. As a Mandarin speaker, I was awestruck at the similarities between Korean and Mandarin. I noticed that Korean differed from Mandarin in both word order (SOV vs SVO) and subject/object markers. But aside from those two things, there were quite a few similarities - lack of articles, possessives, adjectives, lots of Sino-Korean words, family terms (Korean seems to go a bit further and takes into account of the speaker's gender, like a female would call her brother differently than a male would call his brother). Sometimes, it's a matter of me thinking in Chinese, inverting the word order, and doing activities in Korean. I was exposed to Mandarin tones since birth and the English language since I was 4 years old. So, I was never aware of the difficulties of learning a non-tonal language. However, after learning Korean, a non-tonal language, I could empathize with other tonal-language speakers. A person highly sensitive to Chinese or Vietnamese contour tones may experience confusion or frustration when the tone is changed for some reason. Indeed, my conjecture was confirmed by
this claim on Wikipedia: "Vietnamese is a tonal language and speakers may try to use the Vietnamese tonal system or use a mid tone with English words, but they pronounce with a high tone when the closed syllable is followed by /p, t, k/. They may also associate tones onto the intonational pattern of a sentence and become confused with such inflectional changes." Yep, that sounds like me learning Korean.