Standard Chinese shares a similar system of grammar with the many language varieties or dialects of the Chinese language, different from those employed by other language families, and comparable to the similar features found within the Slavic languages or Semitic languages. Beyond genetic similarities within the Sino-Tibetan language family to which Chinese belongs, there are also strong similarities within the East Asian sprachbund, a group of mutually influenced but not directly related languages, including Japanese and Korean.

One key feature of Chinese grammar is that all words have only one grammatical form, as, with minor exceptions, the language lacks conjugation, declension, or any other inflection. Functions such as number in nouns or tenses in verbs are expressed through word order or particles; thus, where nouns in other languages might be distinguished by singular and plural ("woman" and "women") or verbs by number or person ("I go", "he goes"), Chinese lexemes are typically invariant.