When I first started coming to China and getting involved speaking Chinese on a daily basis, I was often confronted with a situation in which I thought I knew what was being said because I understood each of the words used. It’s an easy approach if you’re translating directly, but direct translation has its faults. Often, it will lead to misunderstanding and get you into a bit of trouble that with a more perfect understanding you would have been able to avoid.

One standout example is the phrase

要不要？
Yào bù yào?

Now translated directly, this means “want no want,” which to me came out to something very close to “Do you want it or not?” Walking down a street full of vendors in Yabaolu (雅宝路), each of whom shouts at you “do you want it or not?” over and over again even after you’ve passed on by can be, and has been, interpreted as both annoying and aggressive. Add to that the onslaught of another variant on the phrase:

买不买？
Mǎi bù mǎi?

Which, if translated directly, can also be aggressive: “Buy no buy?” In our black and white, yes and no world, this can be interpreted quite simply as “Are you going to buy it or not?” And in the world of haggling and bargaining, a world that is very much a Chinese one, there is no faster way to end negotiations. This is not their intent, and it led me to reanalyze the sentence structure I’d interpreted as so aggressive. I raised the question with my teachers and discovered that it wasn’t the vendors being aggressive and hostile, it was me who’d just misunderstood how people phrase a question in Chinese.

To add the Chinese “不” between verbs is simply a way of phrasing a question. Remove the “or not” from the direct translation and you’ll have “Do you want it?” and “Will you buy it?” which are quite different questions than “do you want it or not?” and “will you buy it or not?” Once I understood the essential different, China became a much friendlier place.

Here are three more examples that use the V+不+V sentence structure to form a question:

你去不去？
Nǐ qù bù qù?
Are you going?

你同意不同意？
Nǐ tóngyì bù tóngyì?
Do you agree?
你饿不饿？
Nǐ è bù è?
Are you hungry?