In this Topic, we're going to learn the essentials of how questions work in Japanese and meet the question particle, か.

Asking questions in Japanese is refreshingly simple. Instead of changing the word order like we do in English (e.g., changing 'It is' to 'Is it?'), we can just add か to the end of a phrase.

This small addition unlocks basic conversation. By the end of this Topic, we will be able to take statements we already know and turn them into questions.

Now that we know about か, let's look at how asking questions changes between polite and casual sentences.

If I May Be So Bold As To Inquire

As we've just learned, in polite speech (sentences ending in です), we simply add か. You may be surprised to see that Japanese questions often don't use a question mark. Because か marks the sentence as a question grammatically, a simple Japanese period (。) is often used instead.

I'm Just Gonna Ask You 'Bout Something

In casual language, か is usually not added at all. In fact, だ is also normally dropped, as it can sound too assertive or even aggressive.

Instead, we can rely on intonation. The sentence will have a rising tone, similar to a question in English. In writing, a question mark can be used to show this.