Book excerpt: Mandarin Chinese has less complicated grammar than French, German, or English. Basic sentence structure in Chinese is subject - verb - object, just like English. Word order is very important in Chinese, since verbs aren't conjugated, and nouns aren't declined. In English, verbs take different forms, such as see/saw/seen, in Chinese only one word, kan is used. In English one has to learn when to use cat (singular) or cats (plural), in Chinese there is only one word, mao. The word order in the sentence indicates what is going on. Understanding Mandarin grammar is key to understanding Chinese.