KuroXppi [they/them]

  • 82 Posts
  • 1.18K Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 13th, 2025

help-circle




  • You still need tone of voice and context to distinguish ma from other vocal particles like ma (which used to like, mark things which both the speaker and the listener know or suspect to be true/evident)

    e.g.

    你吃饭了吗 - have you eaten?
    你吃饭了嘛 - [but] you’ve eaten (so you shouldn’t go and get an icecream from the freezer)

    吗 can also be used rhetorically, same as English, so it doesn’t always strictly imply a question, e.g. 你不是昨天给比尔打电话吗?那么,他为什么今天没有来? - Didn’t you call Bill yesterday? So, why isn’t he here today? The real question is in the second clause which isn’t marked with ma, but with 为什么. So a response of 不知道 doesn’t mean ‘I don’t know if I called him’ but ‘I don’t know why he’s not here’

    Secondly, whether you have marked the tense correctly earlier in the sentence can determine the meaning, e.g.

    X 你吃饭 - you eat
    你吃饭吗? - do you eat (not ‘have you eaten’)
    你吃饭了吗? - have you eaten?

    A mistake some Mandarin learners assume is that because Chinese ‘doesn’t have tenses’, they can add particles at the end of the sentence and it’s a done deal, but sometimes the tense marker has to come much sooner than the particle, as in the case of '你吃guo烧烤吗? Have you eaten shaokao before? By that stage, slapping a ma on the end without having 过 in there will have a different meaning (do you eat shaokao) so you can’t pivot.

    tldr, it isn’t as simple as slapping a question tag at the end of the sentence to mark it as a question requiring a response given context, homophones and rhetorical speech. Sorry for the unrequested mini lesson, but it’s a pitfall of convenience that you should be aware of so your default speech habits don’t calcify around serviceable (but ultimately ‘ungrammatical’ solutions.