Grammar · Verbs

了 marks completion, not the past

了 after a verb says the action is finished. When it happened comes from the time word, not from 了.

Chinese has no tenses, so nothing in a verb tells you when something happened. 了 says only that the action is complete, which is why it appears in sentences about the future as readily as the past. At the very end of a sentence it does a second job: it marks a change, saying that something has become true which was not true before.

Examples