¿Qué?

This question comes from Emily in Phoenix, AZ...

"What are question words and how can you tell the difference?"

Great question, Emily; thank you for sending that into me. Also, thank you for being a regular reader of my blog. I'm sure many others are wondering the same thing. I'm going to assume here for a moment that you are talking about question words in Spanish and not in English. Let me first get into what the Spanish question words are, then talk about how you can tell them apart in Spanish.

The following are Spanish question words:

• ¿Qué? which means What?
• ¿Dónde? which means Where?
• ¿Cómo? which means How?
• ¿Cuánto? which means How Much?
• ¿Quién? which means Who?
• ¿Por Qué? which means Why?
• ¿Cuándo? which means When?

When you see questions written in Spanish, the first thing you will notice is the upside-down question mark (¿). This signifies the start of a question. It will close with the normal right-side-up question mark (?). This should be your first indication of a question.

Your second indicator is the accent mark within the Spanish question word. Spanish question words without an accent mark are used in compound sentences usually to connect two ideas together to form one sentence such as the following English example: Jane sees the ball roll into the street when the car approached rapidly. Notice how Jane sees the ball roll into the street can be one sentence all by itself. And the car approached rapidly can be another sentence all by itself. By adding the word when, you can join the two ideas to form a compound sentence. You can do this in Spanish the same way, but you would not have an accent mark on the word cuando for the word when.

When you are listening to Spanish, you will only have the intonation to help you identify a question. This is the same as in English. The tail end of the sentence will pitch upward to signify a question.

One more way you can identify that a question is being spoken is by the location of the subject word. Sometimes, a Spanish-speaker will use a subject word after the verb, but only in a question. Such as this example: ¿Vas tú al concierto? (Are you going to the concert?) Notice how both the English and the Spanish have the subject "you" following the verb. Although in Spanish, you may not hear the subject word spoken at all unlike the English counterpart.

I sure hope this clears up question words for you Emily. Thank you again for writing in and helping others while you're at it. If anyone has a Spanish-related question for me to clarify in a future blog posting, please feel free to ask in the comments section below or send me an email to SpanishMyWay@hotmail.com. I would love to hear from you. ¡Hasta luego!