How do Chinese verb conjugations differ from those in English and Japanese

Chinese verb conjugations differ significantly from those in English and Japanese in several key ways:

• Chinese verbs do not conjugate for tense, person, number, or mood. Instead, Chinese relies on context, time adverbs, and aspect markers (particles such as 了 “le”) to indicate tense and aspect. There are no changes in the verb form itself to reflect these grammatical categories.

• English verbs conjugate extensively for tense (past, present, future), agreement with the subject in person and number, and mood (e.g., indicative, subjunctive). This results in different verb forms for a single verb depending on these factors.

• Japanese verbs conjugate to express tense (past/non-past), mood, politeness, and voice, among others. Conjugation involves changes to the verb stem and suffixes; for example, verbs have forms for polite, plain, negative, potential, and causative constructions. Japanese verbs are highly inflected compared to Chinese.

In summary, Chinese verbs remain invariable and use auxiliary words/particles to convey tense and other meanings, English verbs change form to reflect grammatical categories, and Japanese verbs exhibit rich inflectional conjugation for tense and other functions. ^{1, 2, 3}

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