2.5 Yes/No Questions with 吗 — Epoché
What you will be able to do Turn any statement you can already make into a yes-or-no question by adding one character at the end. Say such a question aloud without changing the word order and without an English-style rise at the end. Answer one the usual way, by repeating the verb, since Chinese has no single word that answers every yes-or-no question. Say what English does to build the same question, and count how many separate operations that takes. Prerequisites : 2.4, together with the three lessons before it. Every statement questioned here is one you can already build, so if any of the four sentence types is still slow, go back to 2.4 Grammar and the lessons it points to before starting. English builds a yes-or-no question by taking a statement apart and putting it back together. "You are a student" becomes "are you a student": the verb has moved in front of the subject. "You drink water" has no verb that can move, so English supplies one that was not there at all and gets "do you drink water". On top of both operations the voice usually rises at the end. Three separate mechanisms, and the second of them conjures up a form of do that the statement never had. Chinese does none of the three. It adds one character, 吗 , said ma , to the end of the sentence, and leaves everything else exactly as it was. That is the whole of this lesson's grammar. The rest of the lesson is about the two things that are easy to get wrong anyway: what your voice should do, and how to answer. The pattern Statement, then 吗 . Not a word moves. Statement Question The question in English 你是学生。 [1] 你是学生吗？ [2] Are you a student? 他是老师。 [3] 他是老师吗？ [4] Is he a teacher? In both rows the statement and the question are separate sentences in the corpus, and they are identical character for character except for the added 吗 and the change of punctuation. Compare what happened in the English column: you are became are you , and he is became is he . The question mark is worth a word. Chinese writing has borrowed the question mark and uses it as English does, but it is not doing any grammatical work here, because 吗 has already marked the sentence as a question. Written Chinese that leaves the question mark out is still perfectly clear. English, by contrast, has statements that become questions by punctuation alone in writing, and those depend on the reader supplying an intonation that the page cannot show. More questions in the same shape Six more, built on the four sentence types of the previous lessons. Read each one aloud, then identify the statement it was made from by deleting the last character. Chinese English 你是中国人吗？ [5] Are you Chinese? 你今天忙吗？ [6] Are you busy today? 你喝水吗？ [7] Do you drink water? 你爱音乐吗？ [8] Do you love music? 家里有人吗？ [9] Is anyone home? 你家里有书吗？ [10] Are there books in your house? Look at what the English column had to do each time. Rows one, two and five used inversion, because they had a form of be available to move. Rows three and four had to invent a do . Row six needed inversion and a rearrangement of the place expression. On the Chinese side, every row is a statement with one character stuck on the end. Row two shows something else worth noticing. The statement it comes from is the adjective construction of lesson 2.3, and in that lesson you were told to put 很 in front of the adjective in a plain statement. In the question 很 is absent. That is usual: the support word belongs to the plain statement, and a question is not making a statement, so the adjective normally stands bare. 很 is not wrong in a question, and you will hear 你今天很忙吗？ too, but the bare form is the neutral one to learn first. Row five has no subject that a speaker could be said to have chosen. Its subject is the place, 家里 , "house-inside", exactly as lesson 2.4 described, and the question asks whether the house has a person in it. English cannot follow that shape, and the corpus translation, "is anyone home", is as close as English gets. What your voice does Nothing that changes the tones. At most the whole question may sit a little higher in the voice than the statement would; the end does not rise the English way. This is the part that has to be practised rather than understood, because an English speaker's rising question intonation is automatic and inaudible to its owner. The reason it matters here more than in most languages is the subject of the whole of volume 0. Chinese uses pitch to tell words apart. The contours of the four tones are the material the language uses to distinguish one word from another, and a pitch movement imposed across the end of a sentence competes with them. A question in Chinese does not need any help from intonation, because 吗 has done the job already, so the sensible thing is to say the sentence with the tones it would have had as a statement and let the final character carry no tone at all. That is what 吗 is: a syllable with no tone of its own, said lightly and quickly, hanging off the end of the last word. It is not stressed, it is not lengthened, and it should not be pronounced MA with a high pitch. Say 你是学生吗 a dozen times with the last syllable as short and flat as you can make it, and compare it with your own instinct, which will want to put the pitch of an English question on it. Answering Chinese has no single word that answers every yes-or-no question, the way English "yes" and "no" do. The usual answer repeats the verb of the question, positive or negative. A question with 是 is answered 是 or 不是 ; a question with 有 is answered 有 or 没有 ; a question with an adjective is answered with the adjective or with 不 and the adjective. Chinese English 我是学生。 [11] I am a student. 我不是学生。 [12] I am not a student. 我有时间。 [13] I've got time. 我没有钱。 [14] I don't have money. 还没有。 [15] Not yet. The short answers are the bare verbs: 是 , 不是 , 有 , 没有 , 忙 , 不忙 . These are not abbreviations of the full sentences; they are the normal way to answer, and a full sentence in reply sounds careful or emphatic, rather as an En