Chinese Verbs
- Chinese verbs are not inflected… meaning that they don’t change form. Only one form of each verb exists; there is no conjugation. It doesn’t matter who is talking, when they are talking about, or who they are talking to, the verb is the same.
Word Order
- Since there is no conjugation of verbs in Chinese, Word order is often your only clue to figuring out who is doing what. The good news is, in normal Chinese declarative sentences, word order is the same as that we use in normal English declarative sentences, being:subject – verb – object
Negation of Verbs
- Negation occurs before the verb and any prepositional phrase, just add a negation word, 不 ‘bu4’, in front of the verb.
Expressing Tense
- Chinese verbs don’t change ‘tense’. Rather, we use time words to indicate whether something will happen tomorrow, is happening now, or happened yesterday. The Chinese language relies heavily on the use of adverbs to communicate what English and many other languages do with different verb tenses.
Measure Words / Classifiers
- In Chinese measure or “counting” words must be used when objects are enumerated. Generally the format is number + measure word + object. When the number is ‘1’, however, it’s OK to omit the number in that case.
Pronouns
- Chinese has 1st, 2nd and 3rd person pronouns. They have singular (I, you, he, she and it) and plural forms (we, you, and they). The same pronouns are used for subject, object, possession, etc.To make a pronoun plural, you simply add the suffix 们 (men) to the pronoun.
