Stepping Stones Across the River

There really is no word for “went,” “ate,” “drove,” “wrote.”
It all happens now; go, eat, drive, write .
Just like unmodified verbs always express the action occurring in the moment of here and now.

It makes the grammar of Chinese terribly simple. No verbs to conjugate. No agreements to facilitate between a noun and its ver-being. In English, we conjugate, but in Chinese we make use of these constructs called “resultive verb endings.”
They are like verbs with footnotes.

吃不下- eat, not go down (I’m stuffed)
走不動- walk, not move (too tired to take another step)
想不出- think, not come out (it’s on the tip of my tongue
)
看不起- look, not go up (look down on someone)
看得出來- look, as it is (it seems that)
吃得慣- eat, being accustomed to (used to eating something)

Simple? Yes! But, it drives us westerners, with our perchance for making nouns and verbs agree with each other, a bit crazy from time to time.
But, perhaps not as crazy as the Chinese (with their ever present linguistic focus on the present) must feel when trying to run their thoughts through the grammatical constructs of the English language.

They often 想不起來 (can not think it through) so, we end up with:

“The spasm was as serious as contraction, causing the eyes and mouth deviated and salivation in sleep.”

Recently, her menstruation was postdated and with distending pain in abdomen.
Now her complexion was dark, nose obstructed with thick and sticky discharge which was repeatedly onset when exposed to cold or without obvious reasons.

Now his toothache better-and-worse made him unable to eat and unable to sleep.
…he felt obstructed in the ear, especially in raining days.

Three times of acupuncture made her pain stopped.

Chinese medicine is already a foreign language even when it is in English. As is so often the case, the square pegs of one language, have a rough go at morphing into the round pegs of another. It would not be such challenge if it were only words and grammar that needed to be filtered; there is also the trapdoor of underlying cultural assumptions.

That, however, is a story for another time.