Hey, I come from Shanghai. It has always been a headache for me to teach Chinese kids about tenses, because you might know that there's no such a thing called tense in Chinese grammar. Oh, grammar does exist in Chinese, and a lot for you to digest; however it is not a good idea for you to start Chinese learning with grammar. Were I you, I will begin with colloquial or everyday Chinese and practice Chinese with any native Chinese available.

Hey, why don't you first try studying a bit and then ask questions?

Chinese pay attention to words and words, a word or a word wrong, then your words mean a whole also changed.

Of course , chinese has grammer , and tence , btw, we have plural too. Gees Jeff you surprised a lot , that you tried to tell the kids chinese has no tense . 主谓宾， 定状补。 that is the most important part of chinese grammar to me , we have verb, noun, adj, adv, we have everything . About tence , somehow you could say that is more simple than english, but we still have that , okay , i did , 了， i have done, 我已经。 I will， 我要， 我将要. i am going to , 我准备， 我计划。 Basically， all the tence in English and in German, could be translated accuratly into chinese . Schocked me a lot by seeing some chinese said no grammar about chinese , are you speaking broken chinese all the time?

As Jeff says it has grammar! It is just another kind of grammar ,not the conventional one you know in English language for example. It doesn't have tenses but it has modifiers and measure words and othe components making up its own unique grammar. As for the 'subject' , you could call it the subject of the sentence as well in Chinese,because the sentence strucutre does have a subject, predicate ( verb + object) Many times you use subject and object without the verb and the sentence will be complete , a unique structure not found in many other languages.