18 Sep, 2009 in
Uncategorized by
Julio Foppoli
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Just like in English, there are two main types of questions: YES / NO QUESTIONS and INFORMATION QUESTIONS.
YES/ NO QUESTIONS
As the name suggests, these types of questions will get either a YES or a NO for an answer.
Example:
¿Tienes cambio? ~ Si. Do you have change? ~ Yes.
To form a YES/ NO QUESTION, in writing, we put an opening question mark at the beginning of the sentence (¿) and a closing question mark at the end of it (?)
When we want to confirm if the listener is following us and agrees with us, we use question tags in the same way as we do in English.
Examples:
Example:? ~ Vivo en Holanda. Where do you live? ~ I live in Holland..
When we ask INFORMATION QUESTIONS, the typical order is:
¿ + QUESTION WORD + VERB IN THE APPROPRIATE TENSE + (PERSON) + (EXTRA INFO) ?
Examples:
¿ Dónde viven Carlos e Ivette? ¿Por qué estudia Roberto en la Universidad Austral? ¿Quién vivió en esa casa? ¿Cuándo vamos a ir al cine?
A common error made by native English speakers is to try to translate auxiliaries such as DO, DID, WILL, SHOULD, etc into Spanish while making questions.
This is wrong. English uses auxiliaries to indicate the tense (i.e. the time) when the action took place, Spanish doesn’t! In Spanish verbs change (inflect) to show the time we are referring to.
For example, if we omit the auxiliary in this question, you have no clue if we are talking about the present, past or future:
Where ________ we meet?
This is because auxiliaries are essential in English for time reference in questions. Now let’s compare these questions in both languages:
As we can see, English uses auxiliaries to show time. In Spanish the verb changes -or inflects - For this reason, you are never supposed to translate the English auxiliaries (DO, DOES, WILL, DID, SHOULD, ETC)
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Published on 18 Sep, 2009 in
Uncategorized by
Julio Foppoli