Hello.
I JUST started learning Mandarin Chinese last Monday. I got a scholarship to an two-week summer course at a local university. Our teacher has assigned us a project and I need to know how to make something past tense. It's in our textbook, but it's kind of vague and I don't really understand. You usually do something with 了, right? I also read that when you are using past tense, you don't use 不 to negate something, you use 没. Is this true?
I would be SO grateful if someone would help me out on this. Thank you for reading! :)
there are no tenses like in english
As far as I know there is no "past tense" in Mandarin, rather there are contextual and agentive ways of referring to things not in this time. Mandarin's actually a really cool language in terms of its grammar and structure. I should learn a little more of it.
My English isn't the best, sorry. If there are no tenses, then how would you refer to something not in this time? It's not as straightforward as German or English, so it confuses me.
You'd have to find a native speaker to answer that for you I'm afraid, heh. I've not studied Mandarin in depth so I couldn't know for sure. You might wanna try the Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/) entry for Mandarin - it'll probably have some useful links to more info.
In advance, sorry for the tl;dr;.
My knowledge of characters is awful (sorry), but I can provide some grammar help with pinyin (I only have a year of Chinese under my belt).
Basically, tense is shown using the time. The particle "le" (了, the character you used) is the particle used to indicate that something in process is at an end. For instance, when saying "What time is it now?" [xianzai shi ji dian le?], the "le" is a vestige of the fact that the clock has reached the current point in time. The "le" particle can be a little confusing, but it mostly comes into play when talking about age or time.
I'll try to give some examples of past tense usage:
Zuotian(2,1) women(3,1) da(3) lan(2) qiu(2).
Yesterday we played basketball.
[Tones are marked in the parentheses. Again, sorry for me being awful with characters.]
For this, all I needed to say when the action happened. In this way, the idea of a basic preterite is formed (I did it yesterday, the action was completed). Ongoing action initiated in the past is not something I'm familiar with in Chinese (1 year doesn't get you very far, especially with a teacher who isn't very good).
This same idea can be applied to future events as well. "xing qi liu wan sheng wo hen mang" [saturday evening I am very busy]. "wanshang liu dian ban women chi wanfan" [we'll have dinner at 6:30PM]. Again, sorry about toneless pinyin (and no characters).
Hrm... that's a basic idea of it. The "le" particle is a little confusing (and I'll fully admit not knowing completely how and where it is used).
Just remember the general format:
[time] [subject] [verb] [modifier] [object] [particles]
Yeah...
Again, anyone with more experience, feel free to correct anything I just said.
Same poster as >>6:
I just found a bit more about "le" (sorry). It is generally used for (and I'm mostly quoting from my notes, for good or for ill) "le indicates an ongoing process, or something already done or completed". The only good example of this I have is "Shang ke le" [class has started] and "xia ke le" [class has ended]. They use the "le" particle to indicate that the stated condition has already occured - "class has already started", in a way.
I'm really not helping on this whole tl;dr; business. :P
Bak por!
>>9
Etou.
ya it's true, i'm a sort of a native speaker of mandarin and having to think about your question is really a challenge , XD
mandarin usually follows this rule:
each column represents words/phrases
(adjective/descriptive)(main)(situation)(verb)(additive information)((adjective/descriptive again)(object)
eg.
(na zhi) (mao)( zai jie shang)( ci)( zhe) (shi) (laoshu)
which literally means:
that cat in street eat- -ing dead mice
ya no tense in chinese but like japanese which has particles, chinese has zhe to mean -ing, le to mean -done before and many other too
oops typo the main there i meant subject, too bad i can't edit on 4ch, i thought main as subject because zhuyu literally means main phrase (subject)
I'm also a new Chinese speaker (well, not that new in comparison... I've been studying it for 3 years now), but I'm pretty sure verbs themselves don't have a past tense. You add "le" (sorry, my computer doesn't display Chinese - the character is very simple, it looks almost like the number 3) after the verb. Or at the end of the sentence. I can't remember when to use either one.
Eg:
"Wo mai le yi ben shu" means "I bought a book."
"Wo kan shu le" means "I read a book."
I hope that helps... I'm not a native speaker myself, any natives out there feel free to correct me.