During the process of teaching Chinese language, teachers often use various methods to check students’ learning results. Among so many testing ways, asking questions is a perfect way for students learn Chinese in China because teachers can know students conditions directly.
But there are many kinds of parts of speech in Chinese language, so different ways of questioning should be used for various parts of speech to help students learn Mandarin Chinese. This essay is aimed at the questioning way for verbs.
As far as I know, even students learn Chinese online free know that the verb can be divided into several types according to different standards. To make it easier, we will discuss the question ways for verb by classifying it into two groups, namely, transitive verbs and intransitive verbs.
For the transitive verbs, which can be followed by objects, teachers had better make collocation before raising questions about them. Let me take “打扫” as an example to help students study Chinese. Teachers should first lead students collocate like “打扫房间” and then ask question like “你常常打扫房间吗?” to test.
The questions should aim at the time, place, object, frequency of the certain actions. Here is an example provided to help students study in China. The word “看” can be expanded as “看书” firstly and then expanded into sentences to ask like:
你昨天看书了吗？（time）
你喜欢在哪儿看书？（place）
你喜欢看什么书？（object）
你常常看书吗？（frequency）
In order to ask questions to the intransitive verbs, which can’t be followed by the objects, let’s take a look some representative words like “醒”, “休息” and “长大”. Since they have no objects, it is needless to consider the collocation. Teachers in Chinese learning programs should ask questions related to the time or place. For instance, we can ask “长大以后，你想做什么？” to the word “长大”.
But there is no need to worry about the intransitive verbs because there are not so many of them in Chinese language. And the intransitive verbs need foreign students to master are less.
When you attend to the one-on-one Chinese learning programs, teachers will emphasize two kinds of verbs. One is the detachable words. The other is the psych verbs. More will be explained in the following parts.
The feature of the detachable words such as “唱歌”, “跳舞”, “吃饭”, “下课” and “吸烟” is that it is the structure of verb-noun structure, namely verb-object construction. Since it has an object, another object is not allowed. Here is a typical example, it is incorrect to say “我帮忙你” because “帮忙” is a word of verb-noun structure with an object, no more needed.
What’s more, there is another characteristic about this kind of words. We can insert some sentence elements into the place between the verb and noun. Accordingly, we can say “唱一支歌” and “唱了三小时的歌”. Students should pay more attention to these words when they study Mandarin Chinese because only the detachable words have this feature.
Another kind of verbs students should notice when they learn Chinese is the psych verbs, which are used to describe people’s mind activity. For some examples, the words like “爱”, “想”, “喜欢”, “担心” and “希望” are all verbs can be followed by the objects. But at the same time, they have the characteristic of the adjectives. They can be modified by “很” like “我很爱你”.
We talk about this kind of words because they have the characteristic that other verbs do not have. As a kind of special verb, students should remember them particularly when they learn Mandarin. We can’t say “我很打你”.
After mastering the asking ways to the verbs and noticing some special aspects of the verbs, teachers will do better when they check the learning results by way of asking questions.