Understanding Chinese Grammar: A Beginner’s Guide

Chinese grammar basics for beginners can be explained simply as follows:

• Chinese grammar is quite different from English and many other languages because it does not use tenses or conjugations. Instead, meaning is often given by word order and context.
• The basic sentence structure is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), similar to English. For example, “I eat apple” (我吃苹果).
• Words do not change form based on tense, number, or gender. Instead, particles or time words are used to show time or aspect (e.g., 了 (le) for past action).
• There are no plural forms for nouns, nor articles like “a” or “the.”
• Questions are often formed by adding question particles like 吗 (ma) at the end of a statement.
• Measure words (or classifiers) are used when counting nouns (e.g., 一个人 “one person,” where 个 is the measure word).

This basic overview helps beginners start grasping Chinese sentence patterns and grammar rules. If requested, a more detailed outline or examples can be provided.

This explanation is based on general recognized descriptions of beginner Chinese grammar found in language learning resources.

References

• “Praktická korpusová lingvistika – čínsky jazyk”: Book review

• Beginner’s Chinese with audio CDs

• An HPSG-based Shared-Grammar for the Chinese Languages: ZHONG [|]

• A Tentative Analysis of the Origin of Middle Chinese Grammar and Its Historical Position

• Chinese Word Spelling Correction Based on Rule Induction

• Analogical Reasoning on Chinese Morphological and Semantic Relations

• The construction of “Taishang zuo-zhe zhuxituan” in mandarin: a Cardiff grammar approach

• NTOU Chinese Grammar Checker for CGED Shared Task

• Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis Based on Policy Gradient LSTM Model

• Grammatical Representations of the Verb Phrase in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from Syntactic Priming in Five-Year-Olds

• Acquisition of Chinese Verb Separation by Adult L2 Learners

• A Hybrid System for Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis and Correction

• What You Need to Know about Chinese for Chinese Language Processing

• Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis Using Ensemble Learning

• Teaching Both Simplified and Traditional Characters to Learners of Chinese as L2

• The Grammatical and Semantic Functions of “with” Structure in Chinese-English Translation

• Chinese Lexical Simplification

• De-constructing small clauses: The case of Mandarin Chinese