When the overseas students are learning the adverbial in Chinese language, the most frequently mistake made is the position of the adverbial, the application of 地and the order of several adverbial modifiers. However, those mistakes can be explained clearly on the basis of knowing clearly the classifications of the adverbials. As a result, the first thing the students need to know first is the classification of adverbial. As a matter of fact, there are many words can act as adverbial in Chinese and the meanings that the adverbial indicates are also various.

However, according to the function of the adverbial, we can divide it into two classifications, the descriptive adverbial and the restrictive adverbial. When you when you learn Chinese online free, you may learn that the former classification can be subdivided into two types, to describe the person with action in semantics and to describe the act. The main function of the adverbial which describes the person with act is to describe the expressions, postures and psychological activities when the act is processed. The words like adjective, state adjectives, the nominal element and the fixed phrases, adverbials and the subject-predicate phrases can act as the descriptive adverbials.

When the main function of the descriptive adverbials is to describe and modify the means of the act, those words act as the descriptive adverbials are mainly the adjective elements, onomatopoetic words, verbal elements, numeral-classifier phrases, nominal elements as well as the fixed phrases and the modal adverbs. It is very important for the students who learn Chinese to tell apart the adverbial describing the act and that of modifying the person with act, which is not only have influence to use 地or not, but also have effects to the order of several adverbial modifiers.

The restrictive adverbial is to limit the sentence and predicate elements from the aspects such as time, location, scope, subject and purpose and so on. Therefore, it has no function of describing and can be divided into several types. 今天, 终于and已经are used to indicate the time and the elements act as restrictive adverbial are words of time, adverbs and preposition phrases. The words such as 明明, 根本and 果然are applied to indicate the manner of speaking while those like 为…, 按…and关于… are used to indicate purpose, accordance, relation and coordination.