Asking “what” with “gì”

In Vietnamese, gì is used to express “what”.

Vietnamese is a wh-in-situ language, which means, in Vietnamese, the question words aren’t moved to the beginning of sentences, but rather stay in their original positions.

Structure

When combining with a noun and/or a measure word, place gì after them. It can also stand alone.

Examples

Usage note

In principle, every measure word can be used with gì, but, in practice, only some of them are commonly used that way. For the others, that usage is very uncommon and context-specific, which means it will sound unnatural when taken out of context.

Cái

Combining the well-known measure word cái with gì produces the phrase cái gì, which literally translates to “what thing”. It can also be used to express “what”. Because of this, the two sentences below mean the exact same thing:

For a comparison, this is similar to che, cosa and che cosa in Italian.

When “what” is placed at the beginning of a sentence, either as the subject or in topic-comment sentences, it is better to use cái gì or another noun plus gì instead of just gì.

Note that, especially in spoken Vietnamese, cái gì is also fine in the last two examples above.

Con and other “biological” measure words

Another measure word that commonly goes with gì is con, which is the measure word of (all) animals (and also some non-animal nouns). For this reason, the phrase con gì means “what animal” (although technically it encompasses all nouns that goes with con, not just animals).

The same thing applies to the “botanical” measure words (although they are also nouns in their own rights as much as they are measure words):

• cây: tree
• bông: flower
• quả, trái: fruit
• hạt: seed
• củ: bulb, tuber

Asking about art and craft works

There are several measure words that can be used with gì to ask about the name of an art or craft work, such as a song, a book or a dish. Technically, such structures, when taken out of context, have two different interpretations: broad and narrow.

• The broad interpretation expects an answer to be a common noun which gives information about the type of the thing.
• The narrow interpretation expects an answer to be a proper noun which gives information about the name of the thing.

For example, the measure word quyển (also cuốn) is used for books, magazines, desk/wall calendars, etc. A question like quyển gì expects an answer like “book”, “magazine” or “calendar” if broadly interpretated, but an answer in the form of “quyển + <name-of-the-book>” if narrowly interpretated.

In fact, it is almost always the narrow interpretation because the broad interpretation rarely makes sense when taken in context (which is reasonable because there are not many situations where it is useful).

Below are the measure words of this type:

Measure word	Noun	Expected answer
		Broad	Narrow
bài	song, poem, lesson	hát, thơ, học	name of the song/poem
bản	(classical) music, drawing, sentence (law), declaration	nhạc, vẽ, án, tuyên ngôn	name of the (classical) piece
bức	painting, photo, letter, wall	tranh, ảnh, thư, tường	name of the painting
khẩu	artillery, gun	pháo, (súng) lục, (súng) trường, (súng) bắn tỉa	name of the gun
món	dish, gift, debt	ăn, quà, nợ	name of the dish
quyển, cuốn	book, magazine, calendar	sách, tạp chí, lịch	name of the book
vở	play	kịch, tuồng, chèo	name of the play

Note that, when the noun is used instead of the measure word, the question asks about the genre of arts, not the name of the work. For example, a question like sách gì expects an answer in the form of “sách + <genre-of-the-book>”, such as văn học (“literature”), khoa học (“science”) or lịch sử (“history”), not an answer about the name of the book.

Noun	Expected answer
thơ	genre of poetry
nhạc	genre of music
tranh	genre/style of paintings
sách	genre of books