How to use the particles 吗 (ma) and 呢 (ne) in Chinese grammar

1100 words (~ 15 minutes)

The particles 呢 (ne) and 吗 (ma) are extremely common in Chinese. This article explains the two particles for beginners.

呢 and 吗 are similar in the following ways:

Both go at the end of a sentence.
Both of them can form questions.
Both of them are pronounced in neutral tone.

But these two particles have different uses:

吗 is used to turn statements into yes-no questions.
呢 is mostly used to turn statements into queries (amongst other things).

Now let’s look at the two particles in detail.

吗 (ma)

As mentioned above, 吗 is a question particle that is used to turn statements into yes-no questions. What exactly does that mean? A yes-no question is also known as a “binary question” or a “polar question”. This simply means that it’s a question that can only be answered with “yes” or “no”. In other words, it’s not an open question.

The question particle 吗 is the easiest way to form this kind of question in Mandarin Chinese. All you do is put it on the end of a plain statement, and the statement becomes a yes-no question. Have a look at some examples:

Those would all be valid sentences without 吗. They would just be plain statements:

Compare the two sets of sentences. You can see that when 吗 is added on the end, they become yes-no questions. All of those questions can only be answered with agreement or disagreement. That’s what 吗 is for.

In this way, 吗 is almost like a question mark that you say out loud. It goes on the end of the sentence and indicates that it’s a question. Have a look at some point statements being changed into yes-no questions with 吗:

Notice how in English you have to re-arrange the word order of the sentence to form these questions. In Chinese, all you have to do is add 吗 on the end.

呢 (ne)

The particle 呢 has more uses than 吗, but we’ll look at the most important one here: forming queries, or asking bounce-back questions.

The most common use for 呢 is probably to form simple queries. All you do is put 呢 after the thing you want to query. This is often equivalent to saying “and … ?”, “what about … ?” or “how about … ?” in English. Some examples:

As you can see, it’s very easy to query things in Chinese using 呢. Just say the thing you’d like to know about, and put 呢 right after it. This is very commonly used to ask ‘bounce-back questions’ in Chinese. This is when someone asks you a question, and you return the question to them after answering it. This is commonly done by simply asking “你呢？”.

There are a few other uses for 呢 in Chinese grammar, but we won’t go into detail about those in this article.

Comparing 吗 and 呢

As you can see above, these two particles are fairly similar. But what are the important differences? Let’s have a look at a few here.

The first difference is that 吗 is only for yes-no questions, whereas 呢 cannot be used in yes-no questions. 吗 always forms these questions, whereas when 呢 is used to form queries, they are open-ended.

The second difference is that 呢 can combine with question words to emphasize a query. 吗 can’t be doubled-up with other question words; it marks questions on its own. For example, 呢 is being used to add a further querying element to these questions:

Those would both be grammatically valid questions without 呢, but by adding 呢 the speaker makes it clear that they don’t just want an answer to the question – they’re questioning the situation or even criticising it. They’ve added a further query to it.

吗, on the other hand, can’t combine directly with other question words in a statement. If there’s already a question word, it fills up the question “slot”, and there’s no more space for 吗.

The only way 吗 can appear with other question words in the same sentence is if it’s used to ask a yes-no question about a condition. That sounds complicated, but this example might make it clearer:

吗 is appearing with another question word (为什么) in that sentence, but it’s not actually part of that question. There are two questions in the sentence here: an inner question about why the person doesn’t eat meat, and an outer question about whether the listener knows the answer to the inner question:

吗 really only applies to the outer question, so it doesn’t clash with the question word in the inner one. Other than that kind of situation, 吗 can’t appear directly together with other question words.