Chinese has no grammar?

You may have heard the claim before, even from native speakers of Chinese or teachers of Chinese. You may even be somewhat sympathetic to the claim, having struggled with the process of learning Chinese yourself and failing to unlock the mystery of the inner workings of the language. Taken at its face value, however, the claim is entirely untrue. Chinese (and indeed any human language on the face of the earth) has as much grammar as English.

But before we refute the claim, we need to know what is meant by grammar. What is grammar? In the broadest sense of the term, grammar refers to the structural patterns or regularities that govern the way we formulate language. The Chinese term for grammar yufa is more transparent in meaning. Yu is language and fa is law. So grammar is the laws of language. The laws are not artificially imposed but rather natural ones (similar to the laws of nature and the laws of physics). Whether we are conscious of them or not (more likely not for native speakers), we have to follow certain rules when speaking a language in order to be understood. Otherwise, we would be babbling and talking gibberish.

Given our understanding of what grammar is, the absurdity of the grammarless claim for Chinese is easy to see. If there is no grammar, then there are no patterns, no rules. Then anything goes? A monkey sitting at a typewriter would be just as capable in formulating sentences, since all it has to do is to put words together in any random order.

We probably should not take the claim at its face value, though, if we are to avoid being disingenuous. The people who made the claim probably have very different idea of what grammar is. We should therefore consider the reasons why the claim was made and what other possible senses the term grammar can have. It seems that there are two main reasons for the grammarless claim:

1. Chinese does not have the kind of grammar that is familiar to speakers of English and other European languages. Chinese has no verbal inflections, no gender, number and case endings for nouns, no tense, in short, none of the features we normally associate with grammar. From a Euro-centric point of view (or a merely conventional one), then Chinese indeed does not seem to have any grammar at all. But if we take grammar to include any and all structural patterns and not just European styled grammar, we will see that Chinese is very rich with grammatical phenomena, many of which have no counterparts in European languages.

2. Chinese grammar has not been studied as thoroughly as English and other European languages. Therefore, we may not be able to explain grammatical phenomena as well yet. There certainly arent as many Chinese grammar books as there are for English. The lack of in-depth studies and thorough understanding of Chinese grammar may have led to the exasperating response to your inquiry on how something works in Chinese: that is just the way Chinese people say it. But just because we cant explain something does not mean that it does not exist. Just because something has eluded explanation does not mean that it is unexplainable. There are grammatical phenomena that we cannot yet explain in Chinese, but their existence cannot be in doubt. Disappointed you may be as a student of Chinese, there is a positive aspect to this state of affairs: there is much unexplored territory for the pioneering researcher on Chinese grammar!