Saying "How"

In my last Learning Mandarin post, I described how to say “what”. Another very common word in English is “how”. And again, it also has a simple translation in Mandarin.

怎么 (Zěnme) is the word for “how”.

Similar to what I mentioned for “what”, you can use “how?” on it’s own, the same way we do in English.

怎么? (Zěnme?) is equivalent to “How?”

Some more examples are:

你怎么样？ (Nǐ zěnme yàng?) is “How are you?”. (Again literally, it’s “you how” and then a word that means “kind” or “type”).

If we add the time period “today” to the sentence, it becomes:

你今天怎么样？ (Nǐ jīntiān zěnme yàng?) and that’s a reasonably common greeting, even though many would just abbreviate it to:

怎么样？(Zěnme yàng?)

If you need to add a verb to “how” to describe the action, it goes after it:

你怎么说“Hello”？ (Nǐ zěnme shuō “Hello”?) is How do you say “Hello”? (Notice again that the order is different to English. Literally, it’s “you how say Hello?”).

2019-12-13