Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
Oh, 了 LE is being used all the time. Well, you can argue either way here. I, personally, wouldn't really call it a GRAMMATICAL past tense, since only the presence of a single word turns it into past tense. Just like European languages have only remnants of tonality (tick and teak would be an example of tonal variations of the same word in English), this past tense is very, very rudimentary. Nothing changes, just a word indicates past or future. Compare adding a simple LE 了or GUO 過 to what the Germans are doing -- 5 different verb forms for each tense! As far as I am aware, in your example, the 了 only tells you that it is in the past, it is the rest of the sentence (learning being an ongoing process) that makes it clear that it is continuing into the present. Seems the present perfect is inferred rather than expressed through a grammatical construction. If you say "我去過了" "I have been there", then no relationship to the present is established with the very same structure. Of course, in Chinese you are able to get that same meaning accross without all that structural baggage! Anyway, I am no linguist, so I am just expressing my thoughts on this.
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In the example I gave, the first sentence with only one 了 considers ambiguously that the event may or may not be completed. The second sentence with two 了 very unambiguously defines the activity as ongoing into the current moment and into at least the immediate future. Few people use the latter, even when it is called for. Some English will chide Americans for absently using the simple past tense while referring to events in an uncompleted day, e.g. "what did you do today?" at 16:00, rather than the appropriate present perfect tense. Does not mean the convention doesn't exist, it simply means it's not used in given environments.
The use of 了 is quite fascinating, and not as simple as defining a change or past activity. The word 過 is not quite as complex as 了 in proper modern usage, and is certainly not interchangeable except in "low-level" colloquialisms. It's the sort of thing purists may frown on...like when people use 不行 instead of 不能 prior to a verb, or pronouncing 角色 as "jiao se"...I hear things like that all the time, and--thanks to being corrupted by my teachers--despite my attempts at being impartial and open-minded to language as a linguist should be, I often find my skin crawling.
The primary reason the colloquial grammar is so loose in society isn't because it isn't formulated, but rather because regional variance and dialectical "pollution" (not intended negatively) influence the output so significantly.
Of course, the language is as people use it, and since it defies formal rules in many places, one always needs to consider whether it's the usage that's wrong, or the rules that are.
