Mastering 了：Understanding Aspect In Mandarin Chinese

My Experience with 了

I myself as a native English speaker was caught off guard when first learning about 了 and its proper grammatical use when writing and speaking Chinese. 了 has several use cases, the most common one expressing the completion of a specific action, whether it be at a point in the past or before the beginning of another action, or an expected or presumed action. So while 了 could almost instinctively be taken as a marker of a past event or action, the second part of the definition refutes this view immediately. For instance, the sentence 我下了班就去 (wǒ xià le bān jiù qù) means “I’ll go right after work” with 了 functioning in the last part of the definition above, as a marker of a presumed action before the beginning of another. In this case, the person in the example will go (somewhere) right after work, and the 了is denoting the future completed aspect of getting off of work before going someplace else.

Further Uses of 了

If I haven’t already lost you with that grammatical explanation above, there is yet two more uses of the word 了 that we haven’t even covered yet. First, to indicate a change of situation or state, whether real or envisaged, and second, after an adjective to express an excessive degree to indicate that something has gone to the extreme. I won’t go into specific examples of these use cases here, see the next paragraph for the reason why.

Learning 了 The Right Way

While I won’t give specific examples of the second and third use cases of 了 as I stated above, I do thoroughly teach all of my students how to properly use 了 in all of their speech and writing, as it is as critical to learn as verb conjugation would be in English or any other Latin-based romance language. Having learned how to use 了 from the perspective of a native English speaker, I am positioned to help students to avoid the pitfalls of incorrect use or non-use of 了 in their everyday speech and writing.

If you’re interested in mastering 了 and other tricky but essential parts of Mandarin grammar, I’d love to work with you one-on-one. Click here to contact me to get started!