"那个人是谁?"
Translation:Who is that person?
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That is not correct, when in plural form, you should only say 那些人是谁? "人们 as a plural form can only work as subject.
Yes in English it is mostly about physical position. "This" thing is closer to you or the one you just picked up to show someone, and "that" thing is something you have to point to because it's over there. However, "that" can also be the implied distance of disliking something. If the thing is right next to you but you don't like it or didn't choose it you would say I don't like "that." And if two men are standing right in front of you, you would say I like "this" guy and not "that" guy. Therefore, that can mean physically further away or something you wish was physically further away because you don't like it.
I think this is because in Chinese you generally just put question word/word that is making an inquiry about something unknown in the same place where the noun would be in a statement sentence. An example sentence in reply would be "That person is my dad" (那个人是我的爸爸). It's like asking "That person is who?" and then replying by saying “That person is ____.” This seems most correct from what I've observed but I am not sure (though dought) that Chinese changes word order like we do in English.
Straight from Wikipedia butbit helped me so here it goes:
Measure words denote a unit or measurement and are used with mass nouns (uncountable nouns), and in some cases also with count nouns. For instance, in English, mud is a mass noun and thus one cannot say "three muds", but one can say "three drops of mud", "three pails of mud", etc.
However, in English no extra word is needed when saying "three people", but in many East Asian languages a numeral classifier is added, just as a measure word is added for uncountable nouns in English. For example, to say one dog and three dogs in Chinese, one would need to say yīzhīgǒu (simplified 一只狗, traditional 一隻狗) and sānzhīgǒu (simplified 三只狗, traditional 三隻狗) respectively, which could be transliterated as 'one animal dog and three animal dog respectively. There are numerous Chinese measure words, and nouns differ in what measure words they can use.
An example with a demonstrative is the phrase for "this person" — 这个 人 zhè ge rén, where the character 个 is the classifier that literally meaning "individual" or "single entity", so the entire phrase means "this individual person" or "this single person". A similar example is the phrase for "these people" — 这群人 zhè qún rén, where the classifier 群 means "group" or "herd", so the phrase literally means "this group [of] people" or "this crowd".