When we help foreign students to review the words have learned, we often check students master them or not by asking questions. To help students to learn Mandarin better, we will talk about some questioning techniques in the following parts. Just like the symbols like “n.” “v.” “adj” “adv” we see in the process of learning English, Chinese words can be classified into different types. Therefore, to teach Mandarin language, we will provide some frequently-used questioning ways for nouns.

There are different ways of questioning because nouns also can be classified into several sorts and each of them has its own questioning method. The followings are some ways used in many Mandarin learning courses.

There are two kinds of questions for the nouns that are related to the place: “（地点A）附近有没有xx？” and “你去过xx吗？”. Accordingly, for the word “超市”, it can be questioned by “学校里有没有超市？” or “你去过学校旁边的超市吗？”.

There are also two questioning ways for the nouns related to the concrete things. They are “你喜不喜欢吃xx？or 你常常吃xx吗？（xx是可以入口的）” and “你家里有没有xx？（一般不入口，可以使用的）”. To help students study Chinese, let me take two examples to explain. For the word “香蕉”, you can ask questions like “你喜不喜欢吃香蕉？” or “你常常吃香蕉吗？”. And when it comes to the word “空调”, you can ask “你家里有没有空调？”.

Even though it is a little difficult to summarize all questioning ways for the nouns that related to the nouns of abstract things, there are some omnipotent questions like “（地点A）的xx怎么样？” and “你喜欢（地点A）的xx吗？”. The following examples are helpful to learn Chinese language. For the word “历史”, you can ask questions like “你喜欢中国的历史吗？”, but when it comes to words like “环境”, you should ask as “学校的环境怎样？” or “你喜欢学校的环境吗？”.

You may wondering why we say “地点A” since we are talking about the abstract things. The reason of turn the abstract thing into the specific objects is for the convenience of answering the questions.

The six questioning methods mentioned above are enough to deal with the ordinary nouns. However, in order to improve the teaching skills, teachers in Chinese language school should learn another skill “matching”.

We all know that nouns do not exist in isolation. They either stay together with verbs or adjectives. So what teacher can do is to teach students the fixed collocation appeared in the text. If there are no such matching in the text, teacher can teach students those often spoken by Chinese people to help them to learn Chinese in China. Here are some examples: “过海关” for the word “海关”, the phrase “坐出租车” for “出租车”. What’s more, you can ask question with them like “你常常坐出租车吗？”. It is the same sense to match an adjective.

When attending Mandarin language courses in China, another difficult point you will meet is the measure words. Here are some simple examples to illustrate what the measure word is. In the phrases “一个人”, “一头猪” and “看几次电影”, the words “个”, “头” and “次” are all measure words.

It is not easy for foreign students who study in China to learn measure words because there is no measure word in English but too many are in Chinese. and the most difficult thing is that the things of the same material have different measure words. For example, the table and the chair are made of wood, but we say “一张桌子” and “一把椅子” differently.

For those students who go to school to study Mandarin, the teacher can practice the measure words by adding them before the nouns to form phrases. For example, for “飞机”, you can just tell them “一架飞机” and “一台电脑” for “电脑”.

The contents above are some questioning technique for different kinds of nouns. Students should practice more to learn Chinese better.