Basic Chinese Grammar - Lesson 04

Chinese grammar is much less complicated than the English one. The real challenge will remain that of learning some new characters every day.

Contents of this lesson

No Conjugation

Past and future

Singular and plural of nouns

No Conjugation

The first good news is that the Chinese language does not conjugates verbs. These remain to the "infinitive"form.

Past and future

As we have just seen, whatever the subject is, the verb does not change. This is also the case for the tense. Indeed the verb doesn't change if we speak about the present or about the future.

In order to refer to the past and to the future in a Mandarin Chinese sentence, we will use two different methods:

1/ Add time markers words and expressions such as "yesterday", "last year", "next week" ... The time marker goes between the subject and verb in a Chinese sentence: S + time marker + V.

2/ To say that an action has been done (therefor in the past), add the particle "le" 了 after the verb or at the end of the sentence.

Singular and plural of nouns

There is no difference between singular and plural nouns in Chinese. In other words, there is no equivalent in Chinese for plurals in "-s". The context is therefor important to understand whether to translate as singular or plural: