了
le
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
A particle that marks an action as completed or a situation as changed. Right after a verb it shows the action is done: 我喝了一杯茶 'I drank a cup of tea'. At the end of a sentence it shows a new situation: 下雨了 'it's raining now'. It does not mean 'past': Chinese verbs have no tenses. It has a neutral tone.
Trợ từ cho biết hành động đã hoàn thành hoặc tình hình đã thay đổi. Đứng ngay sau động từ: việc đã xong, như “đã… rồi”: 我喝了一杯茶 (tôi đã uống một cốc trà). Đứng cuối câu: tình hình đã khác trước, như “rồi”: 下雨了 (mưa rồi), 天冷了 (trời lạnh rồi). Đây không phải thì quá khứ: tiếng Trung cũng như tiếng Việt không chia thì. Đọc thanh nhẹ.
ParticleRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 063 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “了” mean?
A particle that marks an action as completed or a situation as changed. Right after a verb it shows the action is done: 我喝了一杯茶 'I drank a cup of tea'. At the end of a sentence it shows a new situation: 下雨了 'it's raining now'. It does not mean 'past': Chinese verbs have no tenses. It has a neutral tone.
Is “了” formal or informal?
了 is generally neutral.