From the aspect of meaning, nouns are all used to indicate things which can be both specific things like 书、学生and 水 and the abstract such as 思想、感觉 and 友谊. If you attend to school to study Mandarin In China, teachers may also tell you that it can be applied to imply the time and place like 今天and 上海. Generally speaking, the grammatical functions of nouns in Chinese language can be summarized into three classifications as follows.

First of all, nouns are usually functioned as subject and object, including prepositional object. But it doesn’t act as the predicate and adverbial modifier. The nouns act as subject and object respectively in the sentences 这个孩子很可爱 and 他在喝啤酒. But we can‘t say 我很兴趣中国文化. Only when the nouns or noun phrases indicate weather, date, birthplace, appearance, status, personality, occupation or orders can they functioned as predicate. For instance, 今天星期三.

In addition, in oral Chinese, the nouns can be used as predicate when the subject is the 的structure. Accordingly, you can say 她买的裙子，我买的T恤衫. Another grammatical function of nouns that the foreign students who study in China should know is that nouns usually can’t be modified by numerals. It is incorrect to say 三书 and 十苹果. To realize the modification, you should add classifiers after numerals to form quantifier phrase, making it 三本书and 十个苹果.

The third function is that it can be modified by the attributes like adjective, words for status and noun. For some examples, 新学生已经报到了, 红通通的苹果and 我买了一本语法书. The point that the foreigners should pay attention to when they study Chinese is that the nouns in Chinese language can be modified directly by nouns and also modify nouns directly without any change. In the sentence汉语语法其实不简单, 语法 is modified by 汉语 while 语法 modifies 教材 in the sentence 我买了一本语法教材. Besides, 不is not allowed to use together with nouns. We can‘t say 不学生.