mingming

There are only four tones in Mandarin.....

Thessalonian

OK, Naomasa thought there were 8.

mingming

Nope, 4 basic tones and I believe a "toneless" tone that isn't used often.

Thessalonian

So, verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. don't have conjugations, etc.

mingming

In what, Chinese or Japanese?

Thessalonian

Chinese...

mingming

For practical purposes, verbs don't conjugate in Chinese.

Take for example the word: 看 (to watch, to see)

1. 我看电视, wo3 kan4 dian4shi4, I watch the television
2. 他在看电视, ta1 zai4 kan4 dian4shi4, He is watching the television
3. 你看了电视, ni3 kan4 le dian4shi4, You watched the television
4. 我们看过电视, wo3men kan4guo dian4shi4, We have watched the television before

Although the subject and tense changes, there is no verb ending. 看 is still 看.

Thessalonian

So, Chinese grammar should be simple, right?

mingming

It depends on the person. It should be easy because all Chinese words have only one grammatical form, so there is little conjugation, declension, or any other inflection. There is no singular or plural form of nouns in Chinese or verbs by number. All of that is done by word order or particles.

For example:

I'll go in Chinese is wo3 qu4 我去

To say that in past tense English would be:

I went. But in Chinese it's simply wo3 qu4 le4 我去了. The tense change is done by a particle at the end, not by changing a word.

In my opinion, the hard part of learning Chinese is not grammar but memorization. You would need to know a good deal of characters to read a book or newspaper and often times a single character might have multiple meanings. Many characters also have the same pronunciation (xue3 can mean snow or blood) and so it's a pain in ass to type using pinyin if you don't memorize all the characters.

Thessalonian

Is it true that there are dozens of thousands of Chinese characters?