English and Chinese, LEGO and Clay
For us Chinese speakers, we don't really care about when an action happened or in what state it occurred. It's not just tenses; many grammatical concepts present in English like the indispensability of "subject, verb, object" or clear distinction between main and subordinate clauses—simply don't exist in Chinese.
This isn't a flaw in Chinese; rather, it highlights that Chinese prioritizes different aspects when describing the world and expressing ideas. English is like LEGOs, with strict rules for how pieces fit together—studs into anti-studs. Chinese, on the other hand, is like clay. You can mold it here, knead it there, and no one can really say you're wrong.
As Professor Liu Mei-chun puts it, English is sentence-oriented, while Chinese is context-oriented. English relies on its grammatical system, whereas Chinese values the art of "leaving space" (implying meaning without explicit words).
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