nihongo wo benkyou shitai

日本語：	[verb (base 1,3,7)] か
日本語：	[adjective] か
日本語：	[noun] か
English:	Marks an question within a sentence.

I've tried getting my head around this one for a while, which is odd as it should be pretty straightforward. Anyway, here's another go, but before we begin, it's probably also worthwhile mentioning the closely related counterpart かどうか.

I think most people are happy with the concept of interrogatives, if not by the posh name, then certainly by the words themselves. Simply, interrogatives are question words such as when, why, how, what, etc. This is first-year stuff in most language courses and Japanese is no exception; I'll be shocked if there is a langauge student that didn't learn how to say What is your name? or Where do you live?.

However these interrogatives crop up in other, more complex forms on a regular basis. Consider:

Do you know where he lives?
I do not know what she ate, but she looks sick.
Are you happy with when will finish the meeting?

Not such a simple, direct question anymore and so working out how to translate this becomes more difficult. Luckily, Japanese has a construction to cater for this, which in retrospect is obvious (as things often are in retrospect!) The Japanses approach is to construct the core question and then add the remainder of the sentence:

Do you know where he lives?
[where does he live?][do you know?]

I do not know what she ate, but she looks sick.
[what did she eat?][I don't know], [but she looks sick]

Are you happy with when we will finish the meeting?
[when will we finish the meeting?][are you happy?]

Now things look a bit easier, so lets try the translations. Notice how the topic marker は has been replaced with が within the embedded question: One of my text books suggested this.

English:	Do you know where he lives?
Jenglish:	[he][where][lives][Q][know][Q]
日本語：	彼がどこに住んでいるか知っていますか。

English:	I do not know what she ate, but she looks sick.
Jenglish:	[she][what][ate][Q][don't know][but][sick][looks]
日本語：	彼女が何を食べたか知りませんが、病気そうです。

English:	Are you happy with when we will finish the meeting?
Jenglish:	[meeting][when][finish][Q][happy][Q]
日本語：	会議が何時を終えるか大丈夫ですか。

NOTE: When used after ーな adjectives, drop the ーな. With nouns, it comes directly after the noun.

English:	I don't know if it is a dog.
Jenglish:	[dog][Q][don't know]
日本語：	これが犬か知りません。

Example 1:

I found a simple example on http://oshiete1.goo.ne.jp/qa2661156.html.

日本語：	だれか知りませんか？
Jenglish:	[who][Q][don't know][Q]

I translated this as Don't you know who?

Example 2:

Another example from http://knowledge.livedoor.com/3697

日本語：	滝廉太郎の歌碑の場所をどなたか知りませんか？
Jenglish:	[たきれんたろう][of][tanka inscription][of][place][who][Q][don't know][Q]

I had a tough time time with this and credit really should go to Google :-) The first group of kanji were a complete loss - nothing in Jim Breen's dictionary. A Google search revealed a Wikipedia entry for some guy, so happy that this is a name, The second group of kanji needed to be looked up as well. Together they mean 'tanka inscription' which apparently is some kind of poetic writing. Then we have the kanji for 'place' or 'location', followed by who (どなた). After this we have the question particle and doesn't know. So, with NO CONFIDENCE whatsoever, I translate this as Who doesn't know the location of Rendarou Taki's poetic writings?

またね・・・