My Least Favorite Question: “What Did You Study?”
It’s about the grammar of the question. It’s always presented in the past simple tense. What “did” you study? It indicates that studying (and basically the entirety of education itself) was an event that began and ended in the past. The lack of specifying the intended time period implies that I should already know exactly when the studying in question is supposed to have happened: at college when I was a young man. Probably in my early twenties. Obviously, that’s when education occurs in someone’s life. And then it stops. So, when someone asks me what I “studied,” they almost certainly mean the singular subject that dominated my formal schooling for a defined period in my life.
As an author who writes informative non-fiction on a variety of subjects, I’m often even faced with skepticism that I could have studied everything I write on. If I write a book on economics, it must be because I majored in economics at a university many years ago. But if I did that, how could I possibly know enough about linguistics and foreign language education to write a separate book about that? And what about personal development philosophy? Or the book publishing industry? That seems like a long time to spend in formalized higher education. Whenever I write my first book on a new subject, I inevitably encounter people who look up my writing history and declare that it wouldn’t be proper for me to write on this subject because none of my previous books were on it. They apparently miss the circularity of arguing that someone is only qualified to write a book about something after having already written a book about it.
A much better version of the question in question would involve a change from the past simple to the present perfect tense: “What have you studied?” The perfect tenses indicate a range of time passing. In the case of the present perfect, it means a range that started in the past and continues up to the present. “How long have you played guitar?” refers to the time you started playing and continuing up until the present because you still play. “How long did you play guitar?” indicates you used to play and then stopped sometime in the past. Maybe you played for ten years, broke your hand, and never played again. In the same way, “What did you study?” indicates that you used to study and then stopped for some reason. You simply don’t do it anymore.
That’s the sad state of most adult humans the world over. They stop consciously learning as soon as they are no longer required to. They think they should be able to coast by their entire lives on what knowledge was formally fed to them as young adults in a limited domain.
An even better grammatical choice would be to employ the present perfect continuous tense: “What have you been studying?” This carries the same meaning involving a passage of time from past to present, but it emphasizes that studying happens regularly and actively in my life. Education should be seen like eating for someone like me. It happens throughout the day in a variety of ways. I consume useful knowledge whenever I get the opportunity to satiate my appetite. This version of the question much more accurately reflects the type of person I am and sets the questioner’s expectations of the answer more appropriately.
You limit me greatly when you ask me what I studied.