Mandarin · Chapter 15 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Le completion vs change
Grammar for HSK 4.
The short version
Where the 了 (le) sits decides what it means
我吃了饭 (wǒ chī le fàn) wedges 了 (le) between the verb and its object: the meal got eaten. 我吃饭了 (wǒ chī fàn le) strands it at the very end: I'm off to eat now. Three identical words, the particle one slot apart, completion versus a new situation. Run the position test before you ask what it means.
我吃饭了 wǒ chī fàn le
了 (le) is not a past tense, and 没 (méi) kills it
我昨天去 (wǒ zuó tiān qù) is perfectly past with no 了 (le) in sight, and 明天我就走了 (míng tiān wǒ jiù zǒu le) is future with one sitting right there. Habits and flat past descriptions take none at all. Because 没 (méi) and the completion 了 (le) do the same job from opposite ends, they cannot co-occur: 我没吃饭 (wǒ méi chī fàn), never 我没吃了饭 (wǒ méi chī le fàn).
我以前每天都跑步 wǒ yǐ qián měi tiān dōu pǎo bù
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 25 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 8 of 11 in this chapter