Ch 23 · Lesson 5Portuguese · Chapter 23 · Lesson 5 · Grammar primer
Question words
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
, not o
?
Why?Hide
English uses what for two different questions, and Portuguese splits them. When you want a specific answer, a name, a number, a choice, use before Ă©. O Ă© asks for a definition, so o means what is that thing. O asks what a name is.
asks,
?
Why?Hide
Brazilian spelling has four versions. Two words when asking why, one word when saying because: , . At the end of a question the word takes the stress and a circumflex: ? And o , with an article, is a noun: the reason why.
Question word first, then the sentence as it was
?
Why?Hide
Portuguese has no do. A yes-or-no question is a statement with a rising voice: ? An open question puts the question word first and leaves the rest alone: ? In Brazil the question word can even stay at the end: ?
, : the preposition goes first
?
Why?Hide
English leaves a preposition at the end: who do you live with? Portuguese moves it to the front with the question word: ? The same goes for (where from) and , which is how Portuguese says whose.
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 · 5 min readPractice
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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 23 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 5 of 7 in this chapter