Quote:
Originally Posted by Darnellrbts
I found the riht thread to put my questions in now lol. I was wondering if I wanted to ask, what language do you speak? Would it be -go nan desu ka??
Or if I wanted to ask do you speak japanese. Could it be this nihongo nan desu ka?? Sorry but I would have typed the characters, I'm just in a hurry and this question popped in my head while I was Practicing.
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No. Your sentence is basically "What is Japanese?" And your proposed "-go nan desu ka" is "What is [~ language]?"
There is something called the "potential" form. It means "to be able to ~." There are two ways of forming it that are functionally equivalent in the same way "I can ~" and "I am able to ~" mean 100% the exact same thing.
THE FIRST is to change the stem of the verb you can do itself. As you probably know, there are three classes of verbs (beginners know them as "える／いる" "する／くる irregular" and "everything else").
For える／いる verbs, you drop the "る" at the end and add "られる." Then you conjugate accordingly for politeness (ます) tense (ました) or whatever.
Example: たべる (to eat) -> たべられる (can eat)
For irregulars, you memorize: する (to do)->できる, くる (to come)->こられる.
For the rest, you drop the "u" and add "eru." So "はなす" (to speak) -> "はなせる" (can speak).
THE SECOND is to add "ことができる" to the verb and then conjugate "できる" accordingly (できます, できた, できました, etc.).
So for any verb (except する—to do—since it already becomes "できる" as per
THE FIRST above), you have, for example: たべる -> たべることができる. Pretty much literally it translates to "to be able to do the action 'to eat.'"
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Now then, to your question:
"Do you speak __language__?"
You're merely asking if a person
can speak the language (you'll find you need to stop trying to literally translate things and think about the context and purpose of the phrase instead).
So then
"to speak" = はなす
"to be able to speak" = はなせる OR はなすことができる
Normally, you'd have "にほんごをはなす" but "を" becomes "が" before potential verbs (and in clauses "が" often becomes "の"), so:
にほんごがはなせますか。
にほんごのはなすことができますか。
Either is fine, although I believe the second sounds a bit more high-level as it is more wordy and often times wordiness makes things "softer" in Japanese (as it does in English, too).