#inversion

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floral wolfBOT
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Please be patient

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inversion

compact shale
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You're confusing different words

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que <> quel/quelle/quels/quelles

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Que fais-tu... ?
Qu'est-ce que tu fais... ?
Tu fais quoi... ?

warped mauve
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inverting the verbs makes it more formal, not too sure about using the pronoun tu though seems a bit odd iirc

errant mulch
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Ohh, I thought "que" and "quelle" are related.

I'm having trouble understanding the structure of "what...." questions. "Quel est ton nom" is a way to ask "what is your name". I thought the pattern would be similar, like these, but apparently wrong:

  • Quel tu fais dans la vie (what you doing in life), ou
  • Quel est tu fais dans la vie (what are you doing in life)

"Qu'est-ce que tu fais...?" looks pretty far. From a transliterated PoV it looks like "what'is-it what you doing...?".

compact shale
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you can invert with the pronoun tu

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Quel est ton nom → quel means which and refers back to "ton nom"

warped mauve
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"Qu'est-ce que tu fais...?" what is it that you doing

compact shale
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Que fais-tu → que doesn't refer back to anything, it just means what

honest solar
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The word-for-word translation of "qu'est-ce que tu fais" is "what is it that you do/are doing"

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French does not differentiate between "do" and "are doing", both are just straight present tense - "tu fais"

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Literally translating what you gave (roughly, with punctuation to give a sense of how it sounds):
Quel tu fais dans la vie? => Which - you do/are doing in life?
Quel est tu fais dans la vie => Which is "you do/are doing in life"?

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"quel est" will typically used when there's a theoretically limited choice to choose from, and you're supposed to respond with one answer
That's not the main issue here though, the main issue being that "faire" is not the verb "être", so you'd have to reformulate to something like "what is your job?"