There were some questions on tenses in Chinese in my Chinese Grammar post, so I thought it was interesting enough to talk about it briefly here.
Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar (pg 29) has an excellent summary on Chinese tenses, if you understand the grammar terms:
One feature common to all verbs in Chinese is that they do not conjugate for tense. The time of the action specified by the verb is normally indicated by placing a time expression before the verb or at the beginning of the sentence. Chinese verbs do have to be related to aspect, however, in that there needs to be some indication of whether the action has been completed, is on-going, or is part of past experience. This is achieved by introducing an aspect marker le, guo, or zhe as a suffix to the verb, or zài directly before the verb. Action verbs without aspect markers usually express habitual action or intention.
I was thinking of explaining the above in detail, but it’s too tedious because quite a bit of background knowledge is required. Maybe another post, if I’m up to it. Anyway, I hope this is helpful in some way.
