When you want to express “all of a sudden” or “suddenly”, there are two words that come to mind: 突然 and 忽然. Both of these words can be used before verbs as an adverbial modifier. For example, 今天突然/忽然冷起来了。(Jīntiān tūrán/hūrán lěng…
In English, the verb is usually the key to show the different aspects of an action in English, such as be / be doing / was / was doing / are going to / have done / had done, etc.…
In our ‘Practical Chinese Level 1 course’, we studied the grammar structure of ‘是...的 (shì...de)’. In this article, we’re going to elaborate a bit more about it. The ‘是...的 (shì...de)’ combination has the function of emphasizing information. It’s similar to…
Unlike English and some other languages, Chinese doesn’t have a specialized pattern of verb changes to indicate tenses. So how do the Chinese tell the different tenses apart? Well, we usually use time words to express different tenses, and these…
You may have hit a wall in the study of Function words in Chinese. Maybe you have mastered Function words like “着”, “了”, “过”, but the next step is to deal with the myriad words of Associated Constructions, such as…
You may have already learned the how to use the Directional Verbs “……起来” and “……下去”， but in some situations, how they are supposed to be used doesn’t work very well, for example: “唱起来(chànɡ qǐlái)” and “唱下去(chànɡ xiàqu)”. Of course, this…
If you’ve spent more than a year or so learning Mandarin, you’ve probably encountered the familiar predicament where you must decide whether to use 从(cóng) versus 离(lí) or向 (xiàng) versus 往 (wǎng) when talking about distances, directions, periods of time,…
During Chinese class, whenever I ask my students, “今天上课累不累？(jīn tiān shàngkè lèi bu lèi? / Do you feel tired in class today?)”, they often answer me with the phrase ”一点儿累(yìdiǎnr lèi)”(×). But the correct phrase to use here is”有一点儿(yǒu yìdiǎnr)”.…