We learned how to form questions using 嗎 and 呢, another way to form a question in Chinese is to use an interrogative word like who, which, where, when and why. In this lesson we learn two of these words.

In Chinese making questions with interrogative words does not require changing the grammatical structure of a statement. Sometimes it is easier to think of a response to the question, then replace the part of the sentence containing a possible answer with a question word. For example:

As explained above a who question does not change the structure of a normal statement.

We can also add the possessive particle 的 to ask whose, 誰的.

Since a special type of word must come between 哪 and the noun that follows, for the time being we can only use 哪 to ask 哪國人？ We will learn about those special words and how to use them in lesson 15.