Japanese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Japanese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have just learned about "WH question" in japanese. Now I'm learning about "What is" and since the examples are so simple, only "What's your name". I'm curious how to say "What are the differences between car and motorcycle".
This is what I try so far for "What are the differences between car and motorcycle" :
間にそしてオートバイを異なるはなんですか？
And this is for "What are the differences" :
異なるはなんですか？
Are those correct?
To ask about the difference between Ａ and Ｂ, you could say:
Ａ と Ｂ の違{ちが}いは何{なん}ですか？
Here, we put two nouns together with と, giving us the larger noun phrase ＡとＢ. We want to join this to the noun 違い "difference", so we use the genitive particle の.
Literal translation doesn't work very well between English and Japanese; our phrase is literally close to "the difference of A and B". There's no need to say something like "between" in Japanese. The little words like prepositions or particles rarely match up well between languages, and this is especially true between English and Japanese.
間にそしてオートバイを isn't really comprehensible, but it looks like you tried to translate "between" and "and" using a dictionary. That doesn't work, I'm afraid! You can't translate word-by-word into Japanese. You have to learn how sentences are normally formed, and that's different in each language.
For now, don't try to form your own sentences from scratch using a dictionary. Instead, try to pattern everything you say after correct Japanese. You might find a book like Naoko Chino's Dictionary of Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns helpful.
By the way, your sentence doesn't appear to have "car" in it. You can use 車【くるま】 for "car".
I also believe you can say it like so:
AとBは どう違{ちが}うの？
Or "As for A and B, how are they different?
