To have easy conversations you need to know what a person is talking about and be able to introduce new topics! Both of these require you to ask questions. Questions for comprehension and questions for growing a conversation. Let's start with comprehension.
You need to know what people are talking about in a conversation. In your native language you ask questions to do this, questions like,
- "What did you say?"
- "Can you repeat that?"
But in English you don't ask those questions, because you're afraid people will think you don't understand the language. By not asking, you are immediately removing yourself from the discussion!
How do you ask questions? There are two basic ways. You can change the order of the subject and auxiliary (helping) verb – these are inverted questions – or, if there is no helping verb, put do, does, or did at the beginning of the sentence.
1. Inverted questions. Some common helping verbs are is, was, will, can, should, has, and must (there are 23 helping verbs, and I explain them on the Verbs grammar page). For example,
- “He is living in Rome”
He is the subject and is is the helping verb. We change the order of the subject and helping verb to get,
- "Is he living in Rome?"
2. Do, does, did questions. If there is no helping verb in a sentence, we cannot make an inverted question. Instead, we put do, does, or did at the beginning of the sentence. The form you use depends on the subject and tense used in the sentence. As well, the main verb (live, need, cook) is no longer conjugated!
- “She lives in New York”
- "Does she live in New York?"
- "We need to buy that"
- "Do we need to buy that?"
- "He cooked dinner"
- "Did he cook dinner?"
To make your questions more specific, start your sentence with a question word. Question words include, who, what, where, when, why, and how.
- I'm from the US
- Where are you from in the US?
- She will arrive later
- When will she arrive?
- I already introduced myself to them
- Who did you introduce yourself to?