Questions?

Shakespeare in Chinese

To be or not to be…that is the question? Well, apparently that is the question in Chinese as well. In order to ask several questions, you just use descriptor + not descriptor again to form the question.
For example,
Lai bu lai (are you coming or are you not coming)
Hao bu hao (good or not good)
Was Shakespeare actually thinking in Chinese?


More questions

The other way to form a question is to add “ma” to the end of the sentence. The teacher kept making us practice this sound because it is supposed to have no known. As English speakers (especially ones from Lancaster County, PA like myself) we tend to want to go up at the end of a sentence to indicate that it is a question. This is definitely something hard to train yourself out of doing.