English: A: Is Shara a dentist? B: I don’t know who she is. Vietnamese

Now, we will analyze each part to find the similarities and differences.
Firstly, Yes/No question and its equivalence in Vietnamese such as có … không, phải không, à… As I mentioned before, it includes Yes/No question, Tag question and Declarative question.
In Yes/No question, the first thing we can see similar is that “yes” means “có/phải…”, “no” means “không/không phải/không đúng…”. For example,

English:
Do you go to school today?
Yes, I do.
Vietnamese:
Hôm nay em có đi học không?
Dạ có.

S + (có/phải) + V + không?

Op + S + V…?
On the contrary, they differ in structure. As mentioned above, word order in English question is reversed by putting auxiliary verbs, modal verbs or the verb “to be” (operators) before subjects and using intonation, i.e. raise voice at the end of the sentence. While Vietnamese question word order is unchanged, “subject + predicate”, and added with modal particles like à, ư, nhỉ, nhé,hả… or pairs of adverb like có…không, phải không, đã…chưa, có phải…không, and normally we don’t use intonation.

English:
Did he work here before?
Are they your children?
Vietnamese:
Trước đây anh ấy làm việc ở đây phải không?
Chúng là con của chị à?

There is another difference that in English question we have to answer “yes” if we agree, and the following part must be in affirmative form. If we disagree, we answer “no” and the following part must be in negative form. These are contrary to Vietnamese question that we tend to answer “vâng/dạ” in affirmative or negative form.

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