2.6 Question Words Stay Put — Epoché
What you will be able to do Ask a question with 什么 , 谁 , 哪儿 , 几 or 怎么 by putting the question word in the slot where the answer will stand. Turn a statement into a question, and back again, by changing one word and leaving the rest where it was. Say why a question word that is asking something does not take 吗 as well. Answer a question in the word order it was asked in. Prerequisites : 2.5, which built the yes-or-no question by adding a particle and changing nothing else. That lesson is the first half of an argument this one finishes, so keep it open beside this one: 2.5 Grammar . This is one of the hardest lessons in the volume for an English speaker, and the difficulty has nothing to do with the words. All five question words are short, each has one or two ordinary meanings, and you could memorise the list in ten minutes. What is hard is that English speakers have a reflex, built in childhood and never brought to consciousness, that moves the question word to the front of the sentence. Mandarin has no such reflex. The question word stays in the slot where the answer belongs, everything else stays where it was, and nothing changes its form. Because the rule is so simple, it is tempting to read this page, agree with it, and then go on producing English word order for months. The English reflex is faster than the Mandarin rule, so the cure is a habit rather than more explanation: say the statement with a blank in it first, then put the question word in the blank. The practice at the end is nothing but that one move repeated. The pattern Take a statement you can already build from lessons 2.1 to 2.4 and imagine it as a row of slots, each holding one thing: a subject, a verb, an object, a place, a time. To ask about any one slot, take out what was in it and put a question word there. That slot does not move, and neither do the slots on either side of it. So if the statement is "this is a book", then to ask what it is you put the question word exactly where "a book" was. The English equivalent is not "this is what" but "what is this", and the difference between those two is a whole grammatical machine: English fronts the question word and then inverts the subject and the verb to keep the sentence legal. Mandarin does neither, so the question and its answer have the same shape. Here are the five question words the first phase needs. The middle column gives the pronunciation, and the third says what kind of thing goes in the slot when you answer. Question word Pinyin What fills the slot in the answer 什么 （ 什麼 ） shénme a thing, or a kind of thing: what 谁 （ 誰 ） shéi a person: who, whom 哪儿 （ 哪兒 ） nǎr a place: where 几 （ 幾 ） jǐ a number, usually a small one: how many, what number 怎么 （ 怎麼 ） zěnme a manner or a reason: how, why Three of these are compounds. 什么 and 怎么 both end in the suffix 么 , which is said with no tone at all, which is why the pinyin writes it as a bare me . 哪儿 is "which" plus a place-forming syllable. 谁 has a second reading, shuí , used in formal speech and in reading aloud; shéi is what you will hear in conversation, and either is correct. Replace, do not move The table below shows the move in isolation. On the left is a statement; in the middle is the question you get by taking one thing out and putting a question word in its place; on the right is the word that changed. Read the pairs across, and notice that the number of syllables barely changes and the order does not change at all. Statement Question The one word that changed 这是书。 这是什么？ 书 became 什么 那是我朋友。 那是谁？ 我朋友 became 谁 他在家。 他在哪儿？ 家 became 哪儿 我有两只猫。 我有几只猫？ 两 became 几 The fourth row is worth dwelling on. Mandarin has one operation here, the same one as in the other three rows: replace the thing you want to ask about. When that thing is the number, the number slot gets 几 and the counting word after it stays where it was. That is why the next two lessons, on numbers and on counting words, come immediately after this one. Asking what, who, and where All the sentences in this section come from the corpus, with the published English beside them. Cover the English column, read each Chinese sentence aloud, and then say where the answer would go. In every case the answer goes exactly where the question word is standing. Chinese English 这是什么？ [1] What is this? 你说什么？ [2] What did you say? 我们要什么？ [3] What do we want? 那个人是谁？ [4] Who is that person? 谁住在这儿？ [5] Who lives here? 这是谁写的？ [6] Who wrote this? 你住在哪儿？ [7] Where do you live? 她家在哪儿？ [8] Where's her house? 你去哪儿？ [9] Where are you going? Look at the second row and compare the English. "What did you say" puts the question word first and then pulls an auxiliary verb out of nowhere to carry the tense. The Mandarin keeps the subject first, the verb second and the question word in the object slot. Nothing was borrowed and nothing was moved. The fifth row shows that a question word can be the subject as easily as the object. When the answer would be the subject, English and Mandarin happen to agree, because English fronting has nothing left to do: "who lives here" already has the subject in first place. Treat that agreement as an accident, which is what it is, or the object sentences will surprise you. The last three rows are all about place. Each keeps the question word late and none shifts the subject. In the ninth the bare verb is all there is, and "are going" comes from the situation, not from anything in the Chinese. Asking how many and how The remaining two question words ask about quantity and about manner. 几 goes where a number goes, which means it is usually followed by a counting word ( 星期几 , below, is an exception); 怎么 goes in front of the verb, where Mandarin puts words that say how something is done. Chinese English 现在几点？ [10] What time is it? 今天星期几？ [11] What day is it today? 你几点回家？ [12] What time do you go home? 您有几只猫？ [13] How many cats do you have? 你怎么知道？ [14] How do you know? 天气怎么样？ [15] What's the weather like? The first three rows ask about clock time and about the day o