Mandarin · Chapter 1 · Lesson 16 · Grammar primer
Question words
Grammar for HSK 1.
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?
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 readPractice
Practise this lesson
10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 24 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 16 of 21 in this chapter