English help.

Okay folks, this has been a mindf'uck for me long enough so I'ma get it done with. I don't know how to express it so just bear with me.

Question: How do you ask for the pieces of information in bold:
- "Kennedy is our 35th president."
- "That is his fourth car."

Now then, if you're inquiring about a noun, you use "who" or "what" to replace the noun in question. If you're inquiring about time, you use "when", for places, "where", for amount "how many". I just can't think of anything that's not ridiculously lame for the order/count of some noun.

Additional: In Vietnamese, we employ the similar approach to this as English does: The first, the second, the third, the nth, etc... And when we need to flip it around into a question, we simply say "the + [how many]?"

English doesn't really have counters, so it's not exaclty easy... Like with Japanese (It might be the same in Chinese since they use the same characters, I don't know), it'd be like, "大統領の何人目ですか？" and "何台目車?" but with English... It depends on context, I guess.

Um... I would guess you could ask it like :

"What number president is Kennedy?"
"What number car is that now?" or "How many cars is that now?"

Um... I would guess you could ask it like :

"What number president is Kennedy?"
"What number car is that now?"

No. That is ridiculous. English is ridiculous. I'll just go up to him, give him a premise "Kenny is our Xth president." and ask him "What is X?"

Yeah... English is pretty ridiculous with that kind of stuff.

It's hard to turn an answer into a question in English in quite a lot of cases, unlike a lot of other languages I've come across.

I wish English had counters, it would make things easier.

uh i suppose the way most people would ask the president one is 'which president is X.' They may or may not specify what they mean by which but would generally be understood. The i guess most correct/concise way to ask that would be 'what number president is X?' But many would just say which. Something like 'How many cars has X had?' Or 'how many cars is that (for x) now?' for the second. While not in the same vein as far as sentence structure goes, that is how i think of most people asking that. But what number is again more to the form of what you're asking, concise, and not incorrect.

This is quite an interesting question. I looked in one of my grammar books but haven't find a single thing that discusses it. I think you would have to add specifics so there is no room for uncertainty.

I'd probably say "Which president of the United States was Kennedy?" and "How many cars has the person bought before that one?" None of them directly asks what you intended to and I can't think of a way to ask it in English.

I admit Asian languages tackle this so much easily. For Chinese, we simply use 第幾 (which number in a rank/order) to replace ordinal adjectives.

There's no direct way to ask for an "nth" answer. You can, however, fish for an answer to receive the correct word.

"That's his what... third? fourth car?"
"Kennedy was which president numerically? Thirty...."

There's no direct way to ask for an "nth" answer. You can, however, fish for an answer to receive the correct word.

"That's his what... third? fourth car?"
"Kennedy was which president numerically? Thirty...."

I can live with this. Thank you.

just say,

'president kennedy is which number one ?'

'he how many time buy car already ?'

easy to understand, shorter than standard english. fkyes

Which president was Bush, numerically?
Which sibling are you, numerically?
What's the ordinal position of bush in relation to previous presidents?
What was your birth order among your siblings?
How many cars does that mean you own now?
How many cars did you have before adding that one?
How many other cars do you own?

Ascertaining ordinality is possible, you just require very specific language and doesn't have a necessarily uniform phrasing.

Which president was Bush, numerically?
Which sibling are you, numerically?
What's the ordinal position of bush in relation to previous presidents?
What was your birth order among your siblings?
How many cars does that mean you own now?
How many cars did you have before adding that one?
How many other cars do you own?

Ascertaining ordinality is possible, you just require very specific language and doesn't have a necessarily uniform phrasing.

I don't know whether it's just me, but most of those fall into the unnecessarily ridiculous group. Either way, I was just thinking I went crazy and could not pin a word on that concept. Glad to know there's no direct approach to it.