Kilo Lingo

Mandarin · Chapter 7 · Lesson 4 · Grammar primer

Question words

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

Question words stay where the answer would go

No fronting, no inversion, no do-support. Replace the unknown with 什么 (shén me), 谁 (shéi), 哪儿 (nǎ ér) or 为什么 (wèi shén me) in its natural slot and leave everything else alone, so 你去哪儿 (nǐ qù nǎ ér) is literally you-go-where. And never bolt 吗 (ma) onto a wh-question; it is already a question.

你去哪儿? Nǐ qù nǎr?

Where are you going?

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

Read the full article · 6 min read

Practice

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24-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.

Lesson 4 of 10 in this chapter

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