What is the difference between these 2 expressions?


Whose car is it?

A: Kuruma wa dare no desu ka?

B: Dare no kuruma desu ka?

I'm just a beginner but I'm sure these two expressions mean the same thing.

viz. Whose car is it?

I feel that A is more colloquial than B, would I be right?

Version A is how I would have translated the expression.

How would you have translated it?

Is there a more of a nuanced different between these two versions?




I think there are some nuances here. They are hard to translate into English.

Kuruma wa dare no desu ka? That car - whose is it? By putting 'kuruma' at the
front of the sentence I am emphasising it. I would use this if there were a
number of vehicles in front of us and I wanted to ask specifically about the
car rather than the bicycle or the bus.

Dare no kuruma desu ka? Who does that car belong to? Perhaps we've already
been talking about the car or perhaps it's the only vehicle in front of us.
What I want to know about is the person who it belongs to.




I think there are some nuances here. They are hard to translate into English.

Kuruma wa dare no desu ka? That car - whose is it? By putting 'kuruma' at the
front of the sentence I am emphasising it. I would use this if there were a
number of vehicles in front of us and I wanted to ask specifically about the
car rather than the bicycle or the bus.

Dare no kuruma desu ka? Who does that car belong to? Perhaps we've already
been talking about the car or perhaps it's the only vehicle in front of us.
What I want to know about is the person who it belongs to.

