A Brief Introduction of Chinese Grammar

When I was on Quora, I saw some questions and answers like "dose Chinese have grammar?" or"Chinese grammar is very easy". Those thoughts could mislead or confuse the Chinese beginners. So I write this post and may it could offord some help to beginners.

1. First, morden Chinese is a typical analytic language, by contrast, Latin is a typical inflectional language.

Typical inflectional languages, such as Latin, Greek, and Russian, have case, gender, number, complex declension and conjugation. However, these stuffs does't exist in analytic languages, which means Chinese doesn't have these inflectional factors. BTW, English is a inflectional language but highly analytical now so there are some similar points between Chinese and English in grammar.

2. So how does Chinese work without inflectional factors?

The answer is the words' order, functional words and punctional marks.

2.1. The Basic Order of Chinese words

Because typical inflectional languages have perfect but also complex declension and conjugation, they don't care so much about the basic order of words, which means they have the whole six basic words' orders: SVO, SOV, VOS, VSO, OSV and OVS.

For example, in Latin, "he loves money" could be written in six orders:

Ille pecuniam amat.

Ille amat pecuniam.

Pecuniam amat ille.

Pecuniam ille amat.

Amat ille pecuniam.

Amat pecuniam ille.

Although English is highly analytical, it still can write some sentences like Latin, such as "he loves her", "he her loves", "her he loves", "her loves he", "loves he her" and "loves her he" in spite of not comforming to the morden English grammar.

But in Chinese, there is only one basic order——S V O. In this way, we can distinguish the subject and object without declension.

2.2. Some Functional Words

It seemed that every Chinese beginner from inflectional languages speaking countries would have the same question at first: how does Chinese express tense?

In English, we express past tense and perfect tense through conjugation:

do did done

sing sang sung

write wrote written

change changed changed

……

While in Chinese, we use some functional words to achieve the same effect:

曾，了，未，没，过

For example

he＝他，go to＝去，classroom＝教室

He go to the classroom＝他去教室

He went to the classroom＝他去了 教室

He didn't go to the classroom＝他没 去教室

And it is interesting that both Chinese and English use functional words to express future tense:

we＝我们，lose＝失去，she＝她

we lose her＝我们失去她

We will lose her＝我们将 失去她。

Well,This is because English is highly analytical.

to be continue…

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