Do you know the rule for where question words like 什么、谁、哪里、怎么 etc. go in the sentence? It’s amazing how far through the Chinese subjects students can get at university and still be quite unaware of how to work out exactly where these question words go. This important rule is, in fact, not even that often stated in textbooks. So, what is this magic rule? Fortunately, there is only ONE rule for ALL of the Chinese question words:
THE QUESTION WORD FILLS THE SAME SLOT IN THE SENTENCE AS THE ANSWER WOULD
For example:
(i) If you want to ask somebody their name, you will no doubt have no trouble picking 什么 as the correct question word to use. Where should you put it though? In English, it comes at the start of the sentence:
WHAT is your name?
But in Chinese, *什么是你的名字？ is grammatically incorrect. So let’s try and use our rule from above. But before we phrase the question, let’s imagine what the answer would be. The answer to ‘what’s your name?’ is obviously ‘My name is Anthony’ or ‘I am called Anthony’ [though I imagine that if your name isn’t Anthony, you might prefer to answer with your own name]. So let’s write out ‘I am called Anthony’:
我叫Anthony。
Now let’s convert this back into the equivalent question. Instead of ‘Anthony’, which is the ‘answer’ part of the question, we want to use our question word 什么. This gives us (note that of course when you ask somebody, you’ll have to change the 我 to 你):
你 叫 什么？
In English, translating word-for-word, this gives us ‘You are called what?’. Putting the question and the answer side-by-side, you can see quite clearly that the question and answer word orders work in parallel:
你 叫 什么？
我 叫 Anthony。
(ii) Let’s look at another example. Say I want to ask someone ‘Who is he?’. The answer to such a question would be ‘He is such-and-such’, which is a dead-simple A 是 B structure:
他是我的汉语老师。
Let’s replace the ‘answer part’ with the appropriate question word, which in this case would be 谁 ‘who’:
他是[我的汉语老师] –> 谁。
= 他是谁？
This gives us, literally, ‘You are who?’, which is the exact opposite order to the English order of ‘Who are you?’. Let’s put the question and answer side-by-side again just to make sure we see the pattern:
他是谁？
他是我的汉语老师。
(iii) Now, for the next example, let’s use the question word 哪里 / 哪儿 ‘where’. I want to ask somebody where they study. Now, just because we are making a question, it doesn’t mean we should dispense with putting everything in the proper place it goes in the sentence in Chinese. Remember that place phrases come before the verb in Chinese? Well that will be true in both a question OR a statement. And so, that is why the question word 哪里 / 哪儿 usually comes before the verb, preceded by 在, just like any other place phrase would:
你 在 哪儿 / 哪里 学习？
我 在 Monash大学 学习。
(iv) To give another similar example, let’s think about the question word 怎么 ‘how’. The correct placement of this one seems more likely to confuse students than the other question words. So, to work out where 怎么 goes, let’s start off with the answer to the question ‘How did you get there?’. My answer will be ‘I went by train’. Now, remember in Chinese that ‘mode of transport’ phrases are like place phrases, they come before the verb. That means the correct order should be as follows:
我 是 坐火车 去 的。
Next, we want to replace the ‘answer part’ with the question word, which gives us:
你 是 怎么 去 的？
Putting them side-by-side, we get:
你 是 怎么 去 的？
我 是 坐火车 去 的。
And that’s really all there is to it – all of the word order patterns of question words boiled down to a single rule:
THE QUESTION WORD FILLS THE SAME SLOT IN THE SENTENCE AS THE ANSWER WOULD
中文秘诀 | The Secret of Chinese 