Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles

Aspect in Mandarin Chinese plays an important role in interpreting the temporal information of a sentence. It is an important verbal category, which is concerned with the speaker’s viewpoint or perspective on a situation: whether the situation is presented as complete (perfective aspect) or as ongoing (imperfective aspect), etc. Learning to understand the aspect particles or markers, and use them correctly, has always been one of the most difficult tasks for learners of Chinese.

Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles is a pedagogical guide designed to equip teachers with necessary aspectual theoretical knowledge, and is aimed at in-service or trainee teachers, and intermediate or advanced students to reinforce teaching and learning. Challenging exercises are designed and explanations for the correct use of an aspect particle are given, thus making the book more useable and convenient to teachers and enhancing the practical reference value of the book.

Jian Kang Loar is an Associate Chinese Professor at a prominent language institute in Monterey, California. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics and she has been engaged in language teaching for her whole life. She specializes in Chinese grammar, primarily in the verbal aspectual system, the sentence information structure, and Chinese word order. She has published Chinese Syntactic Grammar: Functional and Conceptual Principles (2011) and Teaching Chinese Word Order (in Chinese) (2015). She is also versed in theories of foreign language teaching and learning.