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)”.…
If you need to express an “Approximate Number” in terms of time, weight, age, or any other term that involves a number, there are a number of ways to do it in Mandarin. This is a fundamental and important language…
Unlike other languages such as English, Mandarin does not change the form of its verbs to express past, present, and future tenses. Instead, there are other ways to say how something will happen soon or the near future. Below, we…
In Chinese, and unlike in English, people don’t change the form of a word to express the ongoing continuity of an action or a state of being. Instead, Chinese focuses on using other words to express this. Here are some…