http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415

Suffice it to say that Chinese grammar is NOT "trivial" to anyone who digs into it deeply. No linguist would say so. Chinese grammar, being based in large part on word order and function words, rather than on inflection, is friendly to native speakers of English, and that is one of the reasons I preferred learning Chinese to learning Russian at university while I was taking courses in both. But there is plenty of grammar in Chinese, and plenty of misunderstanding of grammar among Chinese persons that impairs understanding among people who speak differing Sinitic languages.

English, due to its unique development history, has lost most of its inflectional forms, it used to be heavily inflected. So, in that sense its basic grammar is said to be simpler than, say, Ancient Greek or French.

Why not give an example of a grammar point that you think I am missing?

An example I often bring up to English speakers who are learning Chinese is that they have to learn that the Chinese verbal system is based on aspect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect

rather than on tense. Many native English speakers misspeak Chinese as a second language because they struggle to impose their sense of tense on a tenseless language, and meanwhile get Chinese aspect marking all wrong. That can lead to misunderstandings in either direction, as my extensive acquaintance with persons who speak both languages often shows.

  Chinese grammar is trivial.

Likewise with grammar. I'd imagine many of the complexities related in said books are due to attempting to list distributed evolved usages rather than what legitimately constitutes formal grammar. But I'd also like to know if I'm wrong.

Kindly define that. As a student of linguistics, I observed some very broad approaches to researching formal grammars of natural languages. Grammar of natural human languages includes much more than just the features of word accidence you would learn about in a course in Latin or Greek.

I would have just downvoted for disagreement, but you wrote, "But I'd also like to know if I'm wrong," and I can only cheer that willingness to learn. Chinese grammar is expressed largely through different means (word order and function words) from those through which Indo-European grammar is expressed (inflection of word endings), but end result is still that the language has many fussy, arbitrary distinctions constrained by historical accident (or possibly by information theory) that allow for miscommunication among speakers of Chinese who are not all native speakers.

I'll have to think for awhile if I want to come up with a formal definition for formal grammar. If you still care, email me in a couple of days.