Having mastered the basic vocabulary and elementary grammar, a student generally learns to use a language that he wants to achieve mainly by practice in the sentence patterns, which are the living substance of the language.

There are basic sentence patterns and special sentence patterns in Chinese. Most of the special sentence patterns involve word group patterns, adjective patterns, noun patterns, preposition patterns, etc. However, in English most sentence patterns are verb patterns.

A large part of Chinese special sentence patterns are related to the predicate of the sentence, in which nouns, adjectives, word groups, etc play a part. Word groups are important elements forming the predicate of the sentence. Nouns and adjectives alone can also function as the predicate of the sentence. However, phrases (similar to Chinese word groups) as well as nouns and adjectives alone cannot function as the predicate of the sentence in English.

In this book, six Chinese basic sentence patterns and twelve Chinese special sentence patterns are introduced, which cover all the most important and most commonly-used Chinese sentence patterns. This book will minutely illustrate them one by one with charts. They are classified in accordance with their functions in the sentence in a systematical way, along with necessary comparison with English sentence patterns and translation.

When you have got a good command of the structures and usage of the Chinese sentence patterns introduced in this book, you are able to write or to speak standard Chinese more readily and fluently.