Tim has been teaching English for eighteen years, and perhaps the most common difficulty his students have is with constructing questions. Popular textbooks like English File and Headway show how to construct questions, but students need more examples than these books contain. In Episode 5, Tim gave over two hundred examples of one type of question- yes/ no questions, and he later offered students a free PDF containing 201 yes/ no questions organized in tables and with grammatical explanations.
In Episode 13, you can hear hundreds of examples of another type of question, wh- questions, ones that start with question words like who, what, where, when, why, how and which.
Hi, Tim! Could you pls elaborate on the difference between “What days do you have off?” and “Which days do you have off?”? I have some idea, but would love to hear you as a native speaker and a teacher rolled into one.
Wow, I didn’t see this here till it came time to post my next episode! I saw that the response count had gone up and saw it was you.
On to your question…
-“What days do you have off?” sounds a bit like the asker supposes that the other person has a variety of days off but is unsure when they might be.
-“Which days do you have off?” sounds like the asker has a more concrete idea of the different possible days off and wants to know, of the days off the asker already had in mind, the askee has off.
OK, thanks, that was my guess as well, but I still don’t get if there is some difference in the answers, like days of the week vs dates? Or they could be identical and it’s all about the asker’s point of view?
To me “days off” is kind of vague. Technically Saturday and Sunday are days off, but generally “days off” is used more to refer to non-working days beyond the usual Saturday and Sunday. Probably each of these questions would elicit more questions to make the asker clarify a bit more.
If the askee just answers the questions, the answers could be days of the week, dates or holidays.
Also, let’s remember that sloppy language use is the norm, so people could use the two questions interchangeably and answer them in a sloppy way, as well. (Long live slop!)
It may be a case of a sloppy language usage or a sign of its eventual disapperance. I hardly ever hear “which” in Russian, it’s being replaced with “what” all the time. That’s a normal thing in any language though. I remember reading in some book that there was the verb “be” in the present form in Russian several centuries ago! So many errors wouldn’t have been made.