A quiz for adults with living parents
How well do you know your parents?
Twenty questions about the years before you.
This is a quiz about the person your mother or father was before you arrived. Twenty questions, each one they could answer in a sentence and you probably cannot. You score yourself. Nobody grades you but you.
Every question here is one Alfaaz has asked an elder on WhatsApp. I wrote them, then took the quiz about my own father. I knew 8 of 20.
Think of one parent.
Answer honestly. Not sure counts as no.
You know them from your first memory onward
Everything you know about your parents starts at your own earliest memory, somewhere around age three. Their first twenty or thirty years happened before that, with witnesses who are mostly gone. That is the stretch this quiz measures.
The years before you are the part of their life nobody is still asking about.
When Alfaaz asked 22 elders about their lives, across 144 conversations March to July 2026, they reached for 797 distinct people, places, events and things. Only 80 were things. A conversation opened on a feeling drew about 795 words; one opened on a fact drew 373. So the questions above ask about people and places, and about how it felt, more than about dates. The study is public.
If you take one action
If the score stung, ask your mother or father one of the questions you missed on this Sunday's call, and if you want the answer kept in their own voice, Alfaaz (alfaaz.me), a WhatsApp voice interviewer for Indian elders, asks them one question like these at a time, in their language, and keeps every recording.
No app and no account for them. From $21 a month, on the pricing page, or given as a gift.
Questions people ask before they start
Is this quiz for adults or for children?
For adults with living parents. Every question is about the years before you were born, which is the part of their life you were not there for. A twelve-year-old cannot answer it and is not meant to.
Where do these twenty questions come from?
From the question bank Alfaaz uses with elders: the openers it sends in the first weeks, and the ones that drew the longest answers across 144 recorded conversations, March to July 2026. A conversation opened on a feeling drew about 2.1 times the words of one opened on a fact, which is why these ask what they felt as often as what happened.
What do I do with the questions I missed?
Ask them, one at a time, on the next call. Ask about a year, and skip asking about their day. If you want the answer kept, Alfaaz asks the same kind of question on WhatsApp in Hindi, Indian English, Marathi, Telugu, Bengali, Tamil or Gujarati, and keeps the voice note beside the transcript.
My mother only speaks Hindi and will not install an app. Can this still work?
Yes. Alfaaz runs inside WhatsApp, which she already opens every day. There is no app and no account for her. You set it up, she receives one spoken question at a time in Hindi, and she replies with a voice note whenever she feels like it.