There Are Numerous Systems of Expressing Past Tense in Languages Around the World. Different Systems Have Different Features When Expressing Past Events. in the Following, Mandarin and German Will Be Investigated.

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For Mandarin, it is a system that is quite different from western languages. Unlike most of the western languages that will change the form of the verb depending on the time frame, for instance the English verb “kick” will be changed to “kicked” for past tenses, Mandarin does not have such feature. All of the verbs are in single form and will not subject to any changes when there is a change of time frame. However, there are also other ways for Mandarin to express when the past events take place and also different time frames. One of them is to include the time expression in the sentence to notify people about the time interval. For example, “Yesterday I played football.” will be expressed as “昨天我踢足球” in Mandarin. This is not the only form that Mandarin can express the timeframe. Completed actions can also be described clearly by Mandarin using the particle “了”. For this particle, it’s used to indicate that a past action has been completed. The aforementioned example can be used again, while the meaning is I have finished playing football. It is “昨天我踢足球了”. Last but not least, Mandarin can also describe past experience by adding the verb-suffix “過” in the sentence. It is valid to use this verb-suffix when talking about the event has been done already. In Mandarin, it is “昨天我踢過足球”. These three types of changes in sentence have replaced the different forms of changes of the verb for western languages and this is the unique structure of Mandarin. For German, it is also one of the Germanic languages that included English and other western languages etc. German mainly has two types of past tenses which included “The preterite” and “The perfect”. For “The Preterite”, it focuses on the past action, while “The perfect” is past action but the focus is the present state of the subject that is caused by the actions beforehand. For the past tense in German, their verbs will

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