Are there verbs in chinese

The Chinese Verbs List is categorised according to the English verbs in alphabetical order. The definition of a verb is to describe an action, state or occurrence of an event in a sentence such as eat, go, come etc. While we express an English sentence with its verb used, some Chinese words may not necessarily have equivalent Chinese verbs similar to that of English.

An English word may be a verb or a noun. On this page, we concentrate only on the English verbs so that the English speakers have a better understanding of the Chinese Verbs meaning.

So how does someone know that you are referring to something that happened in the past? There are still some rules that need to be followed when constructing sentences that indicate past and future actions in Chinese.

Chinese verbs will not change state, instead, we add a time adverb or an aspect particle to the sentence to indicate past, present, or future. Here are some basic principles you should follow in order to indicate a past, present, or future event in mandarin Chinese. Sometimes, the time adverb can be omitted, but they are often used to indicate that something is occurring presently.

I like you. They are only used when there is an action involved, and cannot be used with modal or stative verbs. I am washing the dishes. You can use your phone to watch TV. Take a seat and have a cup of coffee! I drank a cup of coffee and ate a slice of cake.

I often go to movies and eat hotpot alone. I drank a cup of coffee and a cup of tea. In Chinese, this is usually at the beginning of the sentence. For example:. Once the timeframe is established, it is understood and can be omitted from the rest of the conversation.

Like the time expression, it can be omitted once the timeframe has been established:. If you want to say that you saw the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" yesterday , you would say:.

Take for instance:. This can look something like:. It is often said that Mandarin Chinese does not have any tenses. If "tenses" mean verb conjugation, this is true, since verbs in Chinese have an unchangeable form. However, as we can see in the above examples, there are many ways to express timeframes in Mandarin Chinese. The main difference in terms of grammar between Mandarin Chinese and European languages is that once a timeframe has been established in Mandarin Chinese, there is no longer any need for precision.

This means sentences are constructed in simple forms without verb endings or other qualifiers. When talking to a native Mandarin Chinese speaker, Westerners may get confused with this lack of continuous precision.