Discusses the essentials of Chinese grammar. This book presents Chinese entries in both pinyin romanisation and Chinese characters, and are accompanied, in most cases, by English translations to facilitate self-tuition in both the spoken and the written language. It is suitable for students with some knowledge of the language.

Introduction 1 The ba structure 2 The bèi structure 3 Serial constructions 4 Causative constructions 5 Dative constructions with direct and indirect objects 6 Existence sentences 7 Subject-predicate and topic-comment sentences 8 Sentence particle le 9 Abbreviated sentences 10 Rhetorical questions 9511 Conjunctions and conjunctives linking clauses in compound sentences (1) 12 Conjunctions and conjunctives linking clauses in compound sentences (2) 13 Conjunctions linking words or phrases (summary) 14 Attributives (summary) 15 Adverbials (summary) 16 de, de, de (summary) 17 ‘Every’, ‘each’ – mfi, gè; ‘All’ –yiqiè, supypu and indefinite pronouns 18 Comparisons with bj and méiypu (summary) 19 Various uses of ypu (summary) 20 Idiomatic uses of shì (summary) 21 The aspect marker le (summary) 22 The aspect markers D zhe, (zhèng)zài and guo (summary) 23 The idiomatic uses of D lái zhe, bei, ma, bà le, me and ba, 24 The idiomatic uses of one, 25 Onomatopoeia and interjection, Vocabulary Lists: English to Chinese, Chinese to English