Really confused about tenses and use of participles,the conditional and subjunctive?
I've trying for aaaages to grasp the concepts of tenses in Chinese but I just honestly cannot understand at all >.< In European languages, I can get that fine. I mean, I've just completed making a verb/tense table in Spanish of (I think) all the possible tenses in Spanish (there's about 18 entries). I then tried to do the same for Chinese, using the same tense headings. I know what you're thinking, I was perhaps stupid trying to compare Chinese alongside a romance language :P So needless to say I've been totally stuck >.<
To help, I also used the sentences that xiaophil posted in his post The Final Grammar Result but I'm still finding things hard to grasp >.< From my understanding, what determines a tense is a particle in each sentence. So this is what I've got so far:
Present
- 我看
- I read
- No particle needed
- 我在看
- I am reading
- 在 indicates an action is ongoing at that time
- 我过看
- I have read
- 过 indicates the action has been experienced in the past
- 我看了
- I read ('red' not reed' - past)
- 了 indicates a completed action
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