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Chinese grammar
General aspects of Standard Mandarin Grammar
All Chinese dialects share a similar grammar system, different from those employed by other language families. All words have only one grammatical form, as the language lacks conjugation, declension, or any inflection at all (there are minor exceptions). Concepts like plural or past tense are expressed in a syntactical way.
Tenses are not indicated grammatically; their tense is clarified with adverbs of time ("yesterday", "later") or aspect particles or prepositions indicating completion of an action or change of state (along with several other context-dependent meanings). Particles are also used to form questions; the syntax of a question is exactly the same as a declarative statement (basically Subject Verb Object) with only the appended particle, such as "ma" in Mandarin, making it a question. Similarly, the plural is not indicated grammatically except in pronouns and polysyllabic nouns referring to people.

Because of the lack of inflections, Chinese grammar may appear quite simple compared to that of the Romance languages to a speaker who is used to inflected languages. However, Chinese displays a very high level of complexity in its syntax.

Syntax
A Topic-prominent language
Chinese is considered to be a topic-prominent language, where the topic of the sentence (defined as "old" information whereupon the sentence is based) takes precedence in the sentence. For example, the following sentences do not seem to follow normal subject-first word order, but adhere perfectly to the topic-comment structure and therefore sounds correct to a Chinese mother tongue.
This book I have read.
Today climb mountains, tomorrow camp outdoors.
Swim[ming] I am the best.
Serial verb Construction
Serial verb construction is a basic feature of Chinese grammar, in which two or more verbs are concatenated together. This is the English equivalent of a Chinese sentence:
literal: This movie I look-no-understand.
I can't understand this movie (even though I watched it.) (double-verb, where the second verb, "understand", suffixes the first and clarifies the possibility and success of the relevant action.)
The Chinese Script
Apart from others grammatical questions, if you want to study Chinese the first difficulties you must face are its script and alphabet.
The Chinese Script is the only ideographic (symbol) script still in use today, and at the same time it is the oldest one in use (about 3200 years). Its great advantage is that is can be used by all Chinese dialect speakers in and outside of China that call the same thing with a quite different pronunciation that can hardly be recognized by somebody who only speaks the official standard language. People that can not communicate by language can make use of the characters to make an understanding possible. Even people that speak a language that is totally different from Chinese, like Korean, Japanese (and Vietnamese), are (were) able to communicate with each other by using Chinese characters. The character of Chinese as a language with isolated syllables not having a declination or conjugation makes it possible to express every spoken word in a written form simply by writing one single character. One word corresponds to one syllable and to one single character.

But the great problem of Chinese language is that it has only very few syllables compared to languages with closed syllables (for example the European languages except English, the Altaic languages like Mongolian or even Korean and Japanese). There is an extremely high number of words that sound totally identical, even if Chinese language has four (dialects have more) pitches of tone (high, low, rising, falling). This homophony (equal sounds) in Chinese language comes from the governmental official's language (guanhua, in Portuguese called Mandarin) that developed during the Yuan (1279-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties in the northern capital in Peking.

Officials that came from different regions of the vast empire of China had to create a common language that based upon the smallest common denominator. Like most languages, Chinese thus shows the trend to simplification. Words that sounded very different two thousand years ago, sound absolutely identical today.

The Number of Chinese Characters
Many people ask how many characters (hanzi) build up the Chinese writing system. The most comprehensive dictionary ever made, the Hanyu da zidian from 1990, contains more than 50.000 characters. But "normal" character dictionaries contain about only 10.000 characters. Many of this huge number of characters are used solely for special terms in poems, novels, or sciences or in old literature, a great amount of characters are used for dialect words and are probably never written in books, and many old characters have died out.

Event: Tadao Ando Lecture
"cosa ho imparato dall'architettura"
What: Informational Meeting
Host: Life.Arch
Start Time: Thursday, December 4 at 6:00pm
End Time: Thursday, December 4 at 8:00pm
Where: Faculty of Architecture of Politecnico di Milano - Bovisa - Aula Magna