Pure love for reading the native language of danmei!

Chinese grammar is ” PERSON -> TIME -> ACTION ”

For example:
I today go          我今天去
I tomorrow go   我明天去
I 3pm go            我三点去

Vocabulary
我 (wǒ) = I
去 (qù) = go
今天 (jīntiān) = today
明天 (míngtiān) = tomorrow
三 (sān) = three
点 (diǎn) = o’clock (depending on the context, that word has a different meaning)

Important key words
在 (zài) = explains the location of something/someone
了 (le) =  explains that an action has already taken place or indicating a change of state in a situation…

Now, for today’s post…

First, let’s take a look in details of the grammar structure of a simple Chinese sentence.

Subject + Time + Location + Predicate

[Predicate] : verb, nouns, objects, negation, adverbial modifiers, prepositional phrases, aspect particles….

Examples :

1. 我昨天晚上在我朋友的家看全職高手了。

Analyze
我 / 昨天晚上 / 在我朋友的家 / [ 看了 / 全職高手。]
I / last night / at my friend's house / [ watched / The King's avatar. ]
Subject / time / 在 ＋ location / [ verb + 了 / noun ]

Grenn's translation : 
I watched The King's avatar at my friend's house last night.
Important note : The 了 indicates that the action is already completed in the past.

2. 她在一堆箱子后面看到了一个小男孩。

Analyze
她 / 在一堆箱子后面 / [ 看到了 / 一个小男孩。]
She / at a pile of box behind / [ saw / a little boy.]
Subject / 在＋location / [ verb + 了 / noun ]

Timebun's translation : She saw a little boy behind a stack of boxes.

3. 从现在起，我就是罗兰了。

Analyze
从现在起，/ 我 /[ 就 / 是 / 罗兰了。]
From now starting from, / I /[ just / is / Roland. ]
Time / Subject / [ adverb / verb / noun ＋了]

Roxerer's translation : From now on, I'm Roland.
Important note : The 了 in this sentence meant that there is a change of state in the situation.
When you read the first chapter of RTW, you know that Cheng Yan is the name of the transmigrator
who entered Roland. The initial situation is Cheng Yan being Cheng Yan. Then the 了 in this 
sentence meant that there is a change and Cheng Yan will no longer be Cheng Yan, but Roland.

It's easier to understand with a context, but if taken out of context, it will simply mean that
being Roland is a new state, but you won't know that the initial state was being Cheng Yan.

From these three examples, you can pretty much see that Chinese sentences have its own structure and it’s not a mumble jumble of characters.

If you use English’s sentence structure as the base, then the order inside a Chinese sentence is similar to words sequence in a machine translated text (MTL). If you can read MTL, then this is a huge step in understanding how Chinese sentences works. Why? Because you know that meaning has more importance than the exact order when comparing to English sentences.

Tips : Don’t try to rigidly emulate English sentence structure with Chinese sentence. Don’t get boggle down by the order or sentence structure because English and Chinese at different in the end.

What more, Chinese sentences have many set patterns which have nothing to do with the simple sentence structure. We won’t talk about it now. This will be something for another post.

======== 10 minutes break and get ready for the next part on “how to read chinese 2″==========

Now that you understand how Chinese sentence works, you will use that knowledge to add in more vocabulary and understand the general meaning of a simple Chinese phrase.

I will give you a few key words that are extremely important to understand some simple sentences.

If you have read the brief summary I made of Grace’s post above, you will see that there are two key words that she talked about. Two key words are highlighted in the examples above.

So whenever you see something like “在 xxxx” you know that it has to do with a location.

If you know that after 在 there is a location, then you can lookup through popup dictionary or apps dictionary and learn a new vocabulary which will be associate to a location. I always do that because my brain retained information better when I associate it with something.

Note : It takes times until you become more proficient. There exists no shortcut when learning a language, only numerous way to do so.