Get to grips with expressing actions and ‘finished’ actions in Chinese by following these sentence patterns and example sentences. We’ll look at suffixes you can use to complete an action and how to create negative action sentences. Performing an Action To describe how an action is performed or how it was performed in the past,… Read More
Learning Chinese already seems like a daunting task what with 5 (sort of) spoken tones and Chinese characters, and although the word ‘grammar’ might make you want to head for the hills, once you learn some basic sentence patterns, you’ll be well on your way to making sentences in Chinese. Obviously, there are other sentence… Read More
要 (yào) meaning ‘to want’ may have been the first verb you learned when you began your Chinese learning journey. It was for me, and even if I sounded like a 3-year-old child saying ‘我要 (wǒ yào), 我要。。。(wǒ yào…)’ all the time, 要 (yào) gave me the freedom for ask for things I wanted in a supermarket, restaurant or cafe…. Read More
We have already covered several Chinese conjunctions in our first article, And, Or and But: Chinese Conjunctions Part 1. The following article covers three more conjunctions: causal, conditional and progressive. Click on the red links to see a full breakdown of all the sentences and Chinese characters throughout the article. 4. 因果关系 (yīn guǒ guān xì) Causal Conjunctions Commonly… Read More
Conjunctions are words that connect phrases and clauses together to form a sentence. In English, some examples of conjunction words are ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘if’ and ‘because’. These words are very similar within the Chinese language, but often follow specific rules and patterns for them to make sense. Below is the first half of our lesson… Read More
Personal Pronouns in Chinese 人称代词 (rén chēng dài cí) One of the first words you probably need to learn is ‘I’ 我 (wǒ). Although in Chinese, you can often get away with missing off the 我 (wǒ) ‘I’ in spoken Chinese, it is important to use it within written Chinese. The word for ‘you’ is 你 (nǐ) and can also… Read More