past tense

[rezaf]

英语的 1- He was not angry.和 2-He was not home. 汉语怎么说？

[FSO]

1- He was not angry.

他 (time phrase) 不生气.

2-He was not home.

他 (time phrase) 不在家.

[roddy]

What textbook and dictionary are you using?

[kdavid]

英语的 1- He was not angry.和 2-He was not home. 汉语怎么说？

Both of those sentences can also be used to convey the present tense.

This is something I had trouble with when I first started studying Mandarin. The point to grasp is that most things (if not everything) in regards to this language are in context. If you want to stress that at a given point in time in the past "He was not angry" or "He was not home" you can add the following:

那时候他不生气. At that time, he was not angry.

or

昨天晚上我给他打电话的时候他不在家. When I called him last night he was not at home.

You can also use the 是...的 structure to emphasize that something was done in the past. Most of the time, however, the 是 is negated. For example,

他是昨天晚上给我打电话的.

It's sometimes a difficult concept for language learners to wrap around their head that people don't often start a conversation with "He was not angry" or some other random phrase. Things are always in context.

[jiehunzheng]

1 - He was not angry. 他当时没生气。

2 - He was not home. 他当时没在家。

[rezaf]

I think there is a contradiction in the replys. Is it "他当时没生气。" or "他当时不生气。"？

to roddy:初级汉语口语（Peiking University) 汉语教程（BLCU) 轻松汉语（Peiking University)

[koreth]

Agreed with kdavid. Chinese doesn't have a past tense. At all. There are ways to express that things happened in the past, of course, but they are not at all analogous to the verb tenses of western languages. If you try to figure out some clever way to simulate a past tense you will just end up with awkward or incomprehensible phrasing. You need to let the idea of a "past tense" go.

I am still internalizing that -- it is a big difference. I think it doesn't help that all the beginning language learning materials I used treated 了 as a past tense marker, which I later discovered it just isn't. And honestly most textbooks, even the intermediate-level ones, seem to do an absolutely miserable job explaining it. Either that, or I'm just dense...

Treating 了 like a past-tense verb suffix is often okay for really basic sentences but beyond that you'll just trip yourself up, and I think I've spent more effort unlearning that bit of misinformation than I would have spent learning what 了 actually indicates in the first place.

I wish there were two different classes of elementary textbooks: "Elementary for people who don't mind slightly incorrect but easier-to-grasp explanations" and "Elementary for people who would rather have a steeper up-front learning curve than pick up bad habits." I've known from the start that I'm in the second category, but all my initial books seemed to be aimed at the first.

[trevelyan]

why not just 他没生气 and 他不在家? There's no temporal information in the latter, but the context usually makes it clear enough.

[HashiriKata]

I wish there were two different classes of elementary textbooks: "Elementary for people who don't mind slightly incorrect but easier-to-grasp explanations" and "Elementary for people who would rather have a steeper up-front learning curve than pick up bad habits." I've known from the start that I'm in the second category, but all my initial books seemed to be aimed at the first.

When Chinese is more popular and more established as a second language, you may have the choice. Meanwhile, you've got to do a lot of thinking by yourself, and as a result you could even end up writing such books yourself and offering the choice to others.

[adrianlondon]

Or do what I did, buy "Chinese Comprehensive Grammar" and spend more time learning grammar rules than actually learning the language. I guess there's a happy medium somewhere ;)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars-S/dp/0415150329/ref=pd_bbs_1/026-3623673-0705264?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179131921&sr=8-1

[kdavid]

That is a fantastic book, by the way.

[ISITEL]

Thank you all, I speak 4 languages all based around Latin. I have learnt some Arabic and am now trying to understand Chinese. I know about all the different dialecs, etc. but let's get down to the nitty gritty. Are you telling me that Chinese people do not study their past? How many of them have learned to read and write their language (percentage)? I learned to pronounce some words in Chinese and found it to be very simple unlike other more difficult languages like Arabic or French. Yet the language of the "Empire" still is Castillian Spanish. Only 5 vowel sounds which are always written and pronouned the same. A,E,I,O, U, no long or short sounds. No extra letters ph, wr, etc. Probably the most simple language in the world yet incorporates formal and informal addresses with regards to the second person, and even God has a different construction, simlar to Thy in old English. Remeber Shakespeare and Henry VIII spoke Latin. But getting back to Chinese, can you please explain how you construct the subject-verb-object? "I speak Chinese"? Please explain this simple construction. Then put it in the past and future tenses: "I spoke Chinese", "I will speak Chinese". Thank you to all.

[ISITEL]

Thank you all, can you explain the contruction: subject-verb-object in Chinese?

[koreth]

ISITEL, don't assume that just because there is nothing in Chinese that precisely corresponds to a particular linguistic feature of Latin-derived languages, that therefore Chinese people must not have studied their past. Honestly I expect the average educated Chinese has spent more time studying history than the average educated westerner. Chinese have no trouble talking about the past, they just don't do it with exactly the same language constructs that westerners use.

"I speak Chinese" would be "我说中文 (wo3 shuo1 zhong1wen2)." "I spoke Chinese" would be "我说中文了 (wo3 shuo1 zhong1wen2 le)." "I will speak Chinese" would be "我要说中文 (wo3 yao4 shuo1 zhong1wen2)."

Aha, you might think, so 了 is how you do the past tense and 要 is how you do the future tense. No. "I spoke Chinese yesterday" can be expressed as "我昨天说中文 (wo3 zuo2tian1 shuo1 zhong1wen2)." No 了 in sight but because the time is specified, the action is understood to have taken place at that time. That's what we mean when we say there is no past tense. It doesn't mean it's therefore impossible to talk about the past! It just means that when we talk about the past in Chinese, we don't necessarily do it by changing our verbs in a particular way.

I can still remember studying Spanish verb conjugation for month after endless boring month in high school. Spanish: "You're saying 'we want,' so make sure you replace the 'er' at the end of that verb with an 'emos,' and oh, by the way, that 'e' in the middle of the verb? Yeah, that stays put, even though it has to change to 'ie' when you're talking about 'me' or 'you.'" Chinese: "You already said the word 'we.' Leave the verb alone."

As for pronunciation, I agree Spanish pronunciation is about the simplest out there. English and French are very difficult to pronounce by comparison. But be careful about Chinese: I suspect that (unless you are extraordinarily gifted at reproducing sounds) if you haven't studied Chinese long enough to know about how it expresses time, you probably haven't learned to properly produce its sounds, some of which do not appear in any major western language -- the retroflex "r," the "i" in "chi", the distinctions between "sh" and "x" or "ch" and "q" or "zh" and "j," and of course tones. If you pronounce the Chinese "ch" like the Spanish "ch," for example, it will sound strange to a native speaker.

And finally, subject-verb-object: I don't understand the question. "我看书 (wo3 kan4 shu1)" = "I read books," a word-for-word translation that's correct in both languages. What are you asking us to explain?

[ISITEL]

Thank you for the long explanation but we are still up in the air..Today we met 2 Chinese businessmen and tried to follow their speech patterns and found the language and sounds very simple yet the construction of the language is what we don't understand. For example, in English/French/Spanish we have the subject: I/You/He/She/It...In spanish things are even feminine and masculin, for example the moon is LA LUNA (female) so if you say THE MOON IS FULL in spanish you say LA LUNA ESTA LLENA...that is a simple subject-verb-object construction (the thing (subject) is (verb) full (object). How do you create this in Chinese. Do they have subjects (pronouns) verbs and objects?? Please explain. We are commercial agents in the USA and deal with real estate if your friends are interested. Are many of the people in this forum actually from and live in China? Thanks, ISITEL.

[HashiriKata]

Are you telling me that Chinese people do not study their past? How many of them have learned to read and write their language (percentage)?

Honestly I expect the average educated Chinese has spent more time studying history than the average educated westerner. Chinese have no trouble talking about the past

Which past are you talking about? The past tense or the past history? Or do you think one reflects the other?

[koreth]

Unfortunately, "The moon is full" is not a subject-verb-object sentence in Chinese.

Chinese has several classes of verbs. Some verbs are like the adjectives of most other languages, but incorporate the idea of "to be" implicitly, so you don't need an explicit "to be." In this case, the verb 满 in "The moon is full" (月满 yue4 man3) means "to be full" rather than just "full." So literally, the two words in that sentence mean "moon" "is full." There is no separate verb required.

A better example, if you want to stick with "to be" sentences: "China is a country." That'd be 中国是一个国家 (zhong1guo2 shi4 yi1ge guo2jia1) and in that case, 一个国家 is the object. The sentence is constructed exactly the same way it would be in English or Spanish: subject, then verb, then object.

However, as in English or Spanish, native speakers will often not use the most basic possible sentence patterns. For example, I can say, "I gave him the book" or "The book, I gave to him" or "I gave the book to him" or "To him, I gave the book." Those are all grammatically correct English sentences that have the same basic meaning but emphasize different aspects of the action by shuffling the word order around. Chinese also has multiple grammatically correct ways to organize a sentence to change the emphasis. It is quite likely that your native speakers were using a variety of sentence patterns to communicate different shades of meaning. Look up the 把 (ba) construction in your Chinese textbook for one example.

And of course in spoken Chinese, as in any other spoken language, native speakers rarely follow the rules of grammar meticulously, use colloquialisms that outsiders may not recognize, and so on.