Learn Chinese – Make no mistake

There are tricks to learning Chinese. There are some commonly made mistakes by learners of Chinese, one of the mistakes is the word order when asking questions. English doesn’t translate perfectly into Chinese, the grammar and word order is different.


In English when we make a question we’d usually put there “where” or “what” first. Such as “what would you like to eat?” But in Chinese you need to put that question word at the end, so you need to say “you would like to eat what?” “你想吃什么?” If you said “什么你想吃” That would be completely wrong and you would get some strange looks.

So remember with questions, the word order changes. Another example might be if you were in China and had your hotel address and were asking “where is my hotel?” you would like to say “my hotel is where?” which is “我的酒店是在哪里？” and not “哪里我的酒店?” Oh just reading it makes me cringe! Lol

李华

Recommended reading:

Easy Peasy Chinese is fun book to help learn some of the concepts in learning Mandarin. It also has some interesting incites into Chinese culture and is pretty cheap too! Chinese isn't easy peasy, but this book makes it fun.