In this Topic, we're going to learn about question words and also look at Japanese question patterns in more detail, combining a variety of grammar points we already know.

Specifically, we're going to learn how to say 'who', and also three different ways to ask 'why'.

We've previously discussed the basics of asking questions in Japanese when we first learned about か. This time, let's look at making more advanced questions, now that we can make more complicated sentences.

Questions, Questions, Questions

When we first learned how to ask questions, we learned about adding か to a polite sentence or simply using a rising intonation in casual ones. Since then, we've learned about how the contextual/explanatory の can be used to ask questions in a variety of ways. Let's put it all together!

First, let's look at the basic range of ways to ask a question across speech registers.

Let's Focus

Next, let's look at the same sort of question but phrased in two different ways.

In the first example below, notice how the question word is marked by が. This is because 誰(だれ) 'who' is the subject, and it is unknown (the identity is unknown). We cannot use the topic marker は here, because a topic must already be known to the listener and speaker. Instead, が zooms in on the specific missing information that needs to be identified.

However, we can use は if we flip the sentence around. By using の to mean 'the one', we can turn the person doing the action into the topic. Because the speaker and listener already know this person exists (maybe they can see them training!), they can be marked with は. Then, we just put 誰 at the end of the sentence to ask who they are (their identity).

Although this looks like a lot of different ways to ask a question, we can see that actually, everything is just made up of simpler parts that we already know!