Vraagwoorden
The question word decides what kind of answer counts — a place, a time, a person, a reason.
Contents
1.What it is
Every open question in the exam opens with one of seven words, and each of them commits you to a category of answer. Learners lose marks here not because they cannot answer, but because they answer a different question than the one asked — giving a time when waar asked for a place, or a fact when waarom asked for a reason. The words themselves are short and easy; hearing which one arrived, in a room, once, is the hard part.
2.Picture it
3.How the exam tests this
Spreken above all: ten of the twenty-two tasks are short answers to a spoken question, and the question word is the first thing you hear and the easiest thing to miss. Two trained assessors judge whether your answer belongs to the category that was asked for, so a fluent answer to the wrong question scores worse than a plain answer to the right one. In Lezen the same words come back inside the questions about each text, and picking the wrong category sends you looking in the wrong sentence.
4.The rule
- Waar haalt u geld uit de muur?
- Waar asks for a place. The answer names a location and nothing else.
- Wanneer vieren Nederlanders Koningsdag?
- Wanneer asks for a time: a date, a day, a part of the year.
- Wie helpt u bij een ongeluk?
- Wie asks for a person or a body. Wat asks for a thing — the two are one letter apart and mean different answers.
- Waarom betaalt u met uw pinpas?
- Waarom asks for a reason, and the answer needs omdat or want. A bare fact is not a reason.
- Hoeveel kost een kaartje voor de bus?
- Hoe asks how, hoeveel asks how much. The answer to hoeveel is a number.
5.Examples
Waar haalt u geld uit de muur?
Waar haalt u geld? In de ochtend.
Bij de pinautomaat answers this. In de ochtend does not, however true it is — it answers wanneer, which nobody asked.
Waarom belt u 112?
The answer has to carry a reason: Omdat er een ongeluk is. Naming the number back, or naming the service, answers wat instead.
Wanneer vieren Nederlanders Koningsdag?
Op 27 april is the whole answer. At A1 a short, exact answer in the right category is worth more than a long one that drifts.
6.Exceptions
Exception 1
Welke asks you to choose from a set that is already on the table, so the answer picks one of them rather than naming something new.
Exception 2
A question with no question word — Betaalt u met de euro? — wants ja or nee first. Answering it with a place is answering a question that was not asked.
7.Watch out
- Hearing waar and answering with a time. It is the most common wasted answer in the short-answer tasks, and the answer itself is usually correct Dutch — just about the wrong thing.
- Answering waarom with a fact instead of a reason. Ik betaal met mijn pinpas is not an answer to why you do; it needs omdat.
- Mixing up wie and wat because they sound close under exam pressure. Wie wants a person; wat wants a thing.
8.In the exam room
Repeat the question word to yourself before you answer — one syllable, silently — and let it choose the shape of your first phrase: waar gives you In or Bij, wanneer gives you Op or In, waarom gives you Omdat. If you did not catch the word, ask Sorry, kunt u dat herhalen? rather than guessing; a repeat costs a moment and a wrong category costs the answer. In Lezen, underline the question word before you go back to the text.
Waar wants a place, wanneer a time, waarom an omdat.