Aspect

Revision as of 09:00, 28 February 2011 by WikiSysop (talk | contribs)

Chinese does not use the concept of formal tenses. Instead, it employs what is called "grammatical aspect." Because Chinese does not have tenses, the question, "how do you form the past tense in Chinese?" is non-sensical. The real question is, "how do you refer to events in the past in Chinese?" You do this through aspect, not tense[1].

References