Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
That is the first I have heard about this. Can you give an example? Anyway, tenses do not exist in modern Chinese. Past tense is indicated by the addition of some word like before, yesterday, 過 guo, 了 le (both of which indicate that the event is over), only.
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Let me dredge up an example.
你學中文學了多久? How long have you studied Chinese? present perfect
你學中文學了多久了? How long have you been studying Chinese? present perfect continuous/progressive
I should add that there's not much to define more precisely the past and future tenses, which are implied by indicating a time reference, rather than through adjusting a functional tense word as in English. Integration of time is mostly additive and modular, which makes it much more optional than it is in languages which modify the internal structure to accommodate for time. This lends the impression that the time values don't really exist, and people who interpret the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in some funky ways end up thinking it means Chinese people don't know anything about linear time.
The distinction is often ignored in conventional use, since most people just stick with the simpler form. I've always felt that Chinese grammar rules linger behind curtains that few people worry about because communicative function and grammatical accuracy have a much weaker bond in Chinese than they do in English and many other languages.
Of course, there are components to English grammar that are often ignored or improperly used by convention, though the rules exist (one example that springs to mind is the distinction between "who" and "whom". How many people correctly use "whom" in English communication without sounding contrived?). Even as people learn their grammar adequately, they rarely think about it enough to identify it. Most English teachers for instance here in Taiwan know very little about their own grammar until they see it defined for them in books that they teach.
If I had a dime for every time someone answered a grammar or vocabulary question with "uh...it just sounds better"....