Italian · Chapter 13 · Lesson 7 · Grammar primer
Question words
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Italian questions need no do and no inversion
A yes-or-no question in Italian is the statement with a rising voice: parli inglese can be a statement or a question depending on how you say it. For open questions, put the question word first, and the subject tends to go last: quando arriva il treno, literally when arrives the train.
Parli inglese?
Qual è never takes an apostrophe
Qual is a complete word in its own right, not quale with a vowel cut off, so qual è has nothing to mark. Italians get this wrong often enough that it is a famous spelling error. Dov'è and com'è are different: a vowel really has been dropped there, and the apostrophe belongs.
Qual è il problema?
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
Read the full article · 8 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 19 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 7 of 17 in this chapter