Ch 8 · Lesson 15Spanish · Chapter 8 · Lesson 15 · Grammar primer
Question words
Prescribed by the AQA specification - revisited.
The short version
, not
¿ ?
Why?Hide
asks for a definition or a category; asks you to pick one out of a set. That is why 'what is your name?' comes out as , even though English reaches for 'what': you are being asked to identify which name is yours. Before a noun, though, usually wins, as in .
Question word first, verb straight after
¿ María?
Why?Hide
Spanish has no do, does or did to build a question. Put the question word first, the verb straight after it, and any subject after the verb. The English habit of subject before verb gives ¿ María ?, which sounds wrong to a native ear.
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 · 6 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 55 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 15 of 17 in this chapter