{"id":15093,"date":"2020-06-08T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T14:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/chinese\/?p=15093"},"modified":"2020-06-08T08:58:18","modified_gmt":"2020-06-08T12:58:18","slug":"asking-questions-in-chinese-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/chinese\/asking-questions-in-chinese-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"A Guide to Asking Questions in Chinese"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learning how to ask questions is important in any language. Even if you can’t really understand responses very well, being able to ask questions at least gets you started conversing with locals. Today I’m going to share a guide to asking questions in Chinese that I hope will help you out. \u52a0\u6cb9!<\/p>\n

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Image by Valerie Everett from flickr.com.
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)<\/p><\/div>\n

Question Words in Chinese<\/h2>\n

Let’s start out with the basic question words in Chinese. Here’s a nice little chart you can copy and paste or print out to study:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n

English<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Chinese<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Pinyin<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

Who<\/td>\n\u8c01<\/td>\nshu\u00ed\/sh\u00e9i<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
What<\/td>\n\u4ec0\u4e48<\/td>\nsh\u00e9n me<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Where<\/td>\n\u54ea\u513f\uff0f\u54ea\u91cc<\/td>\nn\u01ce er\/n\u01ce l\u01d0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
When<\/td>\n\u4ec0\u4e48\u65f6\u5019<\/td>\nsh\u00e9n me sh\u00ed hou<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Why<\/td>\n\u4e3a\u4ec0\u4e48<\/td>\nw\u00e8i sh\u00e9n me<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
How<\/td>\n\u600e\u4e48<\/td>\n\n

z\u011bn me<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

A few notes on these question words: You probably noticed that “who” has two different spellings in pinyin.<\/p>\n

Both are used and there isn’t really a standard one. For “where,” the first word is really only common in Beijing. People in Beijing love adding the \u513f (er) sound to the end of words.<\/p>\n

You can also follow along with this short video I made a while back. It shows each of the question words along with a few examples:<\/p>\n