How to use 了？

[bossidy]

他不去 = he's not going.

他不去了 = he's not going anymore (e.g., he was going to go, but now he's not)

他喜欢她 = he likes her (and has for some time)

他喜欢她了= he likes her now (but didn't until now)

[trooper]

I have had a look in several textbooks and the web to find what they say about using 了 in imperatives. The books' explanations aren't all the same, because they each interpret things differently. Here's a summary along with each book's translations where they have them.

====================================================

1) Oxford Starter Chinese Dictionary, Yuan & Church

Negative imperative: stop someone from doing something

不要讲了

Stop talking about it, don’t talk about it any more.

2）Basic Chinese, Yip & Rimmington

Positive or negative imperative: adds urgency

别说话了

Silence, please!/Stop talking!

起床了

It’s time to get up./Up you get!

3）Chinese English Dictionary of Function Words, Wang

Negative imperative: demands a stop to an action in progress

你吃了不少了，别吃了。

You’ve eaten a lot. Don’t have any more.

Positive or negative: connected to something about to happen.

起来了，起来了，都八点了。

Get up! Get up! It’s nearly 8.

吃饭了！吃了饭好干活儿。

Eat! After you’ve finished, you should get to work.

4）http://chinese.rutgers.edu/r29aux.htm

Positive or negative: softens the tone of an imperative sentence,

上飞机了！

On board (the plane)!

别说话了！电影就要开始了。

Don't talk! The movie is about to start.

===============================================

闭嘴了 should, according to these books, be grammatically correct but has 2 different interpretations.

a) Quick, shut up! (according to Yip & Rimmington)

B) Shhhh, quiet! (i.e. less harsh than 闭嘴, according to chinese.rutgers.edu)

I suppose which one you mean depends how you say it, either gently or forcefully.

[Quest]

闭嘴了 should, according to these books, be grammatically correct but has 2 different interpretations.

a) Quick, shut up! (according to Yip & Rimmington)

B) Shhhh, quiet! (i.e. less harsh than 闭嘴, according to chinese.rutgers.edu)

No no, it does not always work. It's not plug in the equation and solve. "闭嘴了!" does not mean a) nor B). It's not grammatically correct either.

[trooper]

Please explain then.

[Quest]

不要讲了!-- 了here is a 语气助词

闭嘴了! -- 了 here is a 时态助词, which makes 闭嘴 perfect tense. One cannot give a command in the perfect tense.

[smithsgj]

Quest there's no such thing as tense in Chinese, and no such thing as perfect tense in any language. You mean perfective aspect.

zui 嘴 is probably part of the verb here, so the 'le' could well be 语气助词, no? A Chinese linguist sitting opposite me says that's what it is, and that 闭嘴了is unnatural anyway, as does 不要讲了. I'm not going to argue with this, though I suspect as Trooper's research shows that there are cases where an imperative can indeed be used with le. Or maybe la, as I suggested in an earlier post (mind you, isn't la just le+a a lot of the time really?).

Note that neither Yip nor Rimmington are native Mandarin speakers (though they presumably had consultants who are)

[trooper]

An interesting discussion here! I'm learning a lot from this. I spoke to a native mandarin Chinese speaker friend who agreed with your Chinese linguist friend and Quest that 闭嘴了is unnatural. My friends's reasoning was that harsh commands like 闭嘴 sound strange with 了because 了is has an articulate flavour to it, which clashes with the harsh curtness of 闭嘴.

闭嘴啦 or 闭嘴吧 though are fine as commands, since 啦 and 吧 have less of an articulate flavour. Check using a Chinese search engine, and you'll find examples of people using these phrases on their webpages.

Yes it's strange that 啦 is acceptable because often 啦 is 了+ 啊. Perhaps 啊 serves to de-articulate 了.

I guess many imperatives with mild, not harsh, commands like 起床了，吃饭了，走了，etc are ok, because they don't suffer from this clash.

[Quest]

Quest there's no such thing as tense in Chinese, and no such thing as perfect tense in any language. You mean perfective aspect.

There is definitely tense in Chinese -- past, present and future. If Chinese were written in a phonetic script, the tense aspect would have been more obvious.

There are four perfect tenses in Latin: imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect.

There are three perfect tenses in English: present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect.

[Quest]

不要讲了/不要说了 are fine and natural.

闭嘴 as an imperative does not need a 语气助词, and using 了 after it makes it sound unnatural. 闭嘴了could work if it's used as a perfect tense verb, i.e. 他已经闭嘴了。

[Guest Haileyxie]

we use "le" more often than "liao". "liao" is often used to form words like 了解.

[smithsgj]

Quest, can you give an example of a sentence of Chinese which is identical in all respects, except that one is written in the past, another in the present, and one in the future tense?

You are right to say that eg 'amavi' is known as perfect tense in Latin. This is a terminology used only by classicists, however: and what this "tense" really conveys is that (a) something happened in the past, and (B) it has been completed ("perfected"). The past bit is a past tense feature, the completed bit is perfective aspect.

You must agree that the use of the term "perfect" here is dodgy! The Latin scholars saying there are three or four "perfect tenses", and one of them is called the "perfect tense". So we end up with some mad terminological distinction between "THE perfect tense" (only one) and "A perfect tense" (several).

I think you are wrong about the *imperfect* but I'm not sure. the name certainly suggests it's something like "the opposite of perfect". Isn't it roughly the same as the English "past continous"? If so, there are two features again: past tense, and durative (continuous) aspect. In Chinese, the affix -zhe indicates durative aspect.

The idea that English has a proliferation of tenses like past conditional and future perfect is based on the grammar of Latin, not that of English. This topic has come up before: but basically the English future perfect ("I shall have loved") is past tense with perfective aspect and a future modal.

Actually, most linguists would claim that English doesn't even have a future tense. What do you think is the future tense in English? Will? Or shall? But again, they're just modal verbs. There's no real future paradigm in English! I'm going to eat -- is *that* the "future"? Or I'm going to go? How about just "I'm going"? Or "I leave tomorrow"?

You're probably thinking: I go > I will go. He eats > he will eat. But "will" is a relatively rare way of expressing futurity in English (though you wouldn't know it from what English learners are taught!) And really you might as well try to claim that the future tense of chi (eat) in Chinese goes like this:

wo yao/hui chi women yao/hui chi

ni yao/hui chi nimen yao/hui chi

ta yao/hui chi tamen yao/hui chi

If after all that you still don't believe me, we'll have to start a separate thread (another day). But honestly, the standard view from linguistics is that (a) "perfect" refers to aspect, not to tense; and (B) Chinese doesn't have tense. That's not a way of doing down Chinese or saying it's unsophisticated or any such rubbish: it's just as capable of conveying distinctions of time as any other language -- it just does it differently.

[Quest]

I thought tense and conjugation are two different things.

Chinese (Cantonese) tenses:

I eat rice. 我 食 饭。

I am eat-ing rice. 我 食-紧 饭。

I ate rice. 我 食咗 饭。

I have eaten rice. 我 食过 饭。

I will eat rice. 我 会 食 饭。

I've studied Latin for three years, those were the tense names I've been taught to use.

[smithsgj]

They're aspect particles. The distinctions in *English* between

"I eat rice" and "I am eating rice"

and

"I ate rice" and "I have eaten rice

are not distinctions of tense anyway. They are distinctions of aspect.

Where did you get the Cantonese examples? Or did you come up with them yourself?

> I've studied Latin for three years, those were the tense names I've been taught to use.

You're using the names as they are used for Latin. It was wrong of me to suggest that the term "perfect tense" is never used to refer to a tense, because for Latin the term is indeed used to describe an inflectional pattern that covers both tense and aspect.

Your use of the present perfect suggests that you're still studying Latin. You could ask your teacher (a) how apt the term "tense" really is for a pattern that describes aspect as well as tense (B) how it is that a group of tenses called "perfect tenses" can logically include "perfect tense" as a subset, and © whether they are sure that they "imperfect" is one of these "perfect tenses".

Anyway my main point was that Chinese doesn't have tenses and I stand by that 100%. I meant Mandarin really, but I'm pretty sure the same applies to Cantonese.

[Quest]

Where did you get the Cantonese examples? Or did you come up with them yourself?

I came up with them myself. I can give you more if you want, and same rules apply.

Your use of the present perfect suggests that you're still studying Latin.

no, I stopped 4 years ago.

Anyway my main point was that Chinese doesn't have tenses and I stand by that 100%. I meant Mandarin really, but I'm pretty sure the same applies to Cantonese.

Mandarin needs a time adverb for present progressive. Cantonese has an "-ing" equivalent 紧. That is the only difference between Cantonese and Mandarin.

[Guest 了了了了]

see my signature :arrow:

If you can understand it, I am sure you have got a matured skill to use 了

[holyman]

i think nowadays liao is a verb usually means the end of/to end something and le is more of a past tense at the end of sentences or verbs.

了断 liaoduan, to settle something.

了解 liaojie3 understand.

了结 liaojie2 finish(a job)/finish off someone.

了账 liaozhang4 conclude an account/ finish off someone.

[michaelcrm]

I am sorry but I have to say the use of 了/呢/吧/喽/的 are extremely difficult to understand, especially when they are located in the end of a sentence. Sometime even the native Chinese speaker can not tell much difference. I suggest you skip it temporarily and come back later.

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[smithsgj]

> I am sorry but I have to say the use of 了/呢/吧/喽/的 are extremely difficult to understand, especially when they are located in the end of a sentence. Sometime even the native Chinese speaker can not tell much difference.

Canyou provide examples of sentences containing 呢 or 吧 *not* at the end of the sentence? Or offer evidence that native speakers can't tell the difference between them and 了 or anything else? Or make any sort of useful contribution to the discussion at all? Or perhaps you'd prefer we just packed up the whole forum and went home really?

[Quest]

了/呢/吧/喽/的

Native speakers can certainly tell the difference, but they might have a hard time explaining when to use what.

[michaelcrm]

> I am sorry but I have to say the use of 了/呢/吧/喽/的 are extremely difficult to understand' date=' especially when they are located in the end of a sentence. Sometime even the native Chinese speaker can not tell much difference.

Canyou provide examples of sentences containing 呢 or 吧 *not* at the end of the sentence? Or offer evidence that native speakers can't tell the difference between them and 了 or anything else? Or make any sort of useful contribution to the discussion at all? Or perhaps you'd prefer we just packed up the whole forum and went home really?[/quote']

Example for sentence containing "呢" "了" NOT at the end:

以上是王先生的观点，至于我呢对此没有任何反对意见。

有些错误或者失败我们经历了以后才明白，其实是完全可以避免的。

And I can give you thousands of similar examples if you are interested in it. Sometimes, a foriegn language is far more complex than you expect and deserve your more respect, especially when you are studying it.

Or make any sort of useful contribution to the discussion at all?

Sticking around it and trying to obtain a perfect understanding on the usage of words would not be time-effecient for most of us. I suggest to skip it temporarily for more important things, and come back later. Isn't this suggestion remindful, if not helpful for you?

Or perhaps you'd prefer we just packed up the whole forum and went home really?

I believe no one in this forum want to do this. If you disagree with my suggestion, just ignore or show us your reasons. But do not to be extreme. Take it easy.