Over two years ago, I wrote an article titled "Why is Chinese Grammar So Simple?" in which I pointed out that Chinese lacks singular/plural variations, tense changes, and cases (nominative vs. accusative), among other complexities.
Where English uses am, is, are, was, were, have/has been, will be, etc., to express different forms of "be," Chinese solves it with just one character: 是 (shì).
Where English uses do, did, does, done, will/would do, is/was/have been done, etc., to express different forms of "do," Chinese gets it done with just one character: 做 (zuò).
Readers who are interested but haven't seen that article can click the link below to read it:
https://leweishang.blogspot.com/2024/01/why-is-chinese-grammar-so-simple.html
That previous article did not discuss why Chinese invented such a simple grammatical structure. Was it because ancient Chinese people were exceptionally clever, or were they simply forced by necessity? Today, I will discuss this intriguing question.
English, and almost all phonetic (alphabetic) scripts, possess very complex and, admittedly, more rigorous linguistic systems. Beyond complex verbs, their nouns and pronouns are also intricate. Combined with complex grammar, this makes learning English feel incredibly difficult, especially for Chinese speakers. However, English and other phonetic scripts have one major advantage: they are spelled with letters, which is extremely convenient. They also benefit from the close link between spelling and pronunciation.
The forms mentioned above—am, is, are, was, were, have/has been, will/would be—are all spelled out, which is easy to achieve physically. The difficulty lies only in knowing when to use which form.
In contrast, Chinese characters are pictographs. They cannot be "spelled"; they can only be newly created. If the character "是" represented "am," then to represent "is," we would have to invent an entirely new character—let’s call it "是1." We would then need "是2" for "are," "是3" for "was," "是4" for "were," and so on.
Chinese characters are inherently difficult to invent. This difficulty led to methods like derivative cognates (转注) and phonetic loan characters (假借) to solve the problem of character shortages by using one character for multiple meanings. If you tried to make a word like "是" highly granular—requiring a different character for every person and every tense—it would be an "impossible mission" for a logographic system.
Consequently, Chinese verbs evolved to be completely devoid of tense and person variations: I am, you are, he is, we are, you (pl.) are, they are; was yesterday, is today, will be tomorrow, was in the past, will be in the future, is forever... In Chinese, all of these remain simply "是."
While it may lack the formal rigor of English, as long as adverbs/adjuncts (now, yesterday, future, etc.) are added, no misunderstanding occurs. These adverbs have to be created anyway, and once they exist, they can be used anywhere. There is no need to memorize various verb forms or worry about which specific morphology to apply, as one must in English.
Because spelling is easy in English, the language "indulges" itself, allowing verbs, nouns, and pronouns to become incredibly complex. Since it’s just a matter of arranging a few letters, creating a new word is easy. One can also simply add suffixes like -ing, -ed, -or, -er, -tion, etc. How can you add a suffix to a Chinese character? You can't. You would have to create a whole new character.
In short: The extreme difficulty of creating characters forced Chinese into an ultra-simple grammar, using polysemy (one word, many meanings) to solve the character shortage. Conversely, the ease of spelling in English allowed for a complex grammar and a "one meaning, many words" system (e.g., one concept of "be" requiring many different words to express it).
Looking back today, minimalist Chinese grammar is not only helpful for those learning the language but has become a distinct advantage in the AI era: AI running on Chinese characters is 40% faster than AI running on English.
The professional term for this is that "Chinese characters have a higher information density than English." My understanding is simpler: one "是" is equivalent to a whole heap of different English "be"s; one "做" is equivalent to a pile of different "do"s. While this difference isn't obvious in a single character, the gap becomes massive when scaled across the enormous volume of AI operations.
Written on May 1, 2026.
