A1
Question words stay where the answer goes
什么, 谁, 哪儿, 几 and 多少 in Chinese, and the one structural idea that makes them easy — the question word sits exactly where the answer will sit.
English hauls its question words to the front of the sentence: you are going where becomes where are you going. Chinese leaves them exactly where the answer would go, and changes nothing else.
你去哪儿？
Nǐ qù nǎr?
Where are you going?
我去学校。
Wǒ qù xuéxiào.
I’m going to school.
Compare those two. 哪儿 and 学校 occupy the same slot. That is the whole rule, and it means you can build a question out of any statement you can already say: work out where the answer belongs and put the question word there instead.
你叫什么名字？
Nǐ jiào shénme míngzi?
What’s your name?
他是谁？
Tā shì shéi?
Who is he?
什么你喝？
你喝什么？
Moving the question word to the front is English word order wearing Chinese vocabulary. 什么 belongs where the drink belongs — after the verb.
The common ones
- 什么 — what. Also which kind of, in front of a noun: 什么茶, what tea.
- 谁 — who. Said shéi far more often than the shuí dictionaries list.
- 哪儿 / 哪里 — where. 哪儿 in the north, 哪里 in the south and in writing.
- 几 — how many, for small numbers.
- 多少 — how many or how much, for any number.
- 怎么 — how.
- 为什么 — why.
- 什么时候 — when.
几 and 多少 are not the same question
几 expects a small answer — under ten or so — and takes a measure word. 多少 makes no assumption and needs none.
你有几个孩子？
Nǐ yǒu jǐ ge háizi?
How many children do you have?
多少钱？
Duōshao qián?
How much is it?
Asking 你有多少个孩子？is grammatical and sounds faintly absurd, in the way how many children do you have, roughly? would in English.
No 吗, ever
A sentence with a question word is already a question. Adding 吗 asks for a yes or a no, which is not what 什么 wants.
你喝什么吗？
你喝什么？
One question marker per sentence. 你喝什么吗 would be asking do you drink something? — which, incidentally, is 你喝东西吗？
The same words mean “any”
Unstressed and in a statement rather than a question, these words lose their question sense and mean anything, anyone, anywhere. It is the same move English makes with whatever.
我什么都不想吃。
Wǒ shénme dōu bù xiǎng chī.
I don’t want to eat anything.
The 都 is what does it — that pattern is worth learning on its own, but seeing it here stops 什么 in a statement reading as a typo.