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Mandarin Chinese grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Mandarin Chinese encodes each shift.
Common questions about Mandarin Chinese
What can I toggle on the Mandarin wheel?
Subject, tense (past, present, future, expressed via adverbs), aspect (simple, 了 completed, 在 / 着 ongoing, 过 experiential), mood (declarative, question, command), polarity, voice (active, 被 bèi passive), and definiteness with 那 / 这. Each spin rewrites the particles and word order; characters appear with pīnyīn.
Why doesn't the verb itself change when I switch tense?
Mandarin verbs do not inflect. Time is shown by adverbs (昨天 yesterday, 现在 now, 明天 tomorrow), and aspect is handled by particles (了, 过, 在, 着). Toggling tense on the wheel changes those surrounding words while the verb root stays the same.
What's the difference between the four aspect particles?
了 le marks completion. 过 guo marks an experience that has happened at some point. 在 zài before the verb marks an ongoing action; 着 zhe after the verb marks a sustained state. The wheel cycles through them so the contrast is visible on the same verb.
How does the 被 passive work on the wheel?
Switching to passive inserts 被 bèi between the patient and the verb, so 我吃了苹果 'I ate the apple' becomes 苹果被我吃了 'the apple was eaten by me'. The wheel reorders the noun phrases and adjusts particles.
Can I use the wheel without reading characters?
Each generated sentence shows Hanzi, pīnyīn with tone marks, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. The same characters and pīnyīn syllables reappear under each spin, so both surface together.
Sources for Mandarin Chinese
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Huang, C.-T. James, Y.-H. Audrey Li & Yafei Li (2009). The Syntax of Chinese. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Syntax Guides). — Comprehensive formal syntax of Mandarin. [via static/grammar-library/cmn/huang-li-li-2009-syntax-of-chinese.pdf]
- Yip, Po-Ching & Rimmington, Don (2004). Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge. — Broad coverage, well-organized for reference. [via static/grammar-library/cmn/yip-rimmington-2004-chinese-comprehensive-grammar.pdf, 2003 ed.]
- Li, Charles N. & Thompson, Sandra A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. University of California Press. — Foundational English-language functional grammar; authoritative for core syntax and pragmatics. [via static/grammar-library/cmn/li-thompson-1989-mandarin-functional-grammar.pdf, 1989 reprint]