Chinese Question Words - shénme

Question Word Shénme

This is a super straightforward question word. It functions exactly like English (for the most part).

Subj. + verb + shénme  (+object)？	Nǐ xǐhuān shénme？ ——>You like what? (What do you like?) A: 你喜欢什么？     Wǒ xǐhuān gǒu.  ——>I like dogs. B: 我喜欢狗。     Nǐ xǐhuān shénme gǒu?   ——> You like what dog？ A: 你喜欢什么狗？     Wǒ xǐhuān Corgi.   ——> I like Corgi. B: 我喜欢Corgi.
	Notice that in English, we say: “what do you like”. We actually do this huge inversion of our sentence and screw up the order. In Mandarin, our order stays very very simple. And when we answer this question “nǐ xǐhuān shénme”, we will literally replace shénme with our answer, which in this case is “gǒu”.
	Nǐ xǐhuān zuò shénme?  ——>You like to do what? (”What do you like to do?) A: 你喜欢做什么？     Wǒ xǐhuān xué zhōngwén.  ——> I like to learn Chinese. B: 我喜欢学中文。
	Notice that when answering this question, we didn’t use "zuò". That’s because xué (to learn) was our verb instead zuò (to do). Note that xǐhuān is our mental verb, which we always place it right after the subject. Subject like to...