Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to form yes/no questions and use Italian question words to ask for specific information.

Lesson Explanation

Like Spanish, turning an Italian statement into a yes/no question often requires no word reordering — only rising intonation in speech. Unlike Spanish, Italian does NOT use inverted opening punctuation marks:

Parli italiano. — You speak Italian. (statement)
Parli italiano? — Do you speak Italian? (question — same punctuation style as English, just "?" at the end)

Common question words:

Che cosa? / Cosa? / Che? — What? (three interchangeable forms)
Chi? — Who?
Dove? — Where?
Quando? — When?
Perché? — Why?
Come? — How?
Quanto/a? — How much?
Quanti/e? — How many?

A genuinely useful, distinctive detail: perché does double duty as both “why?” and “because” — the same word covers both sides of a question-and-answer pair, something neither Spanish nor English does: Perché non vieni? Perché sono stanco. (Why aren’t you coming? Because I’m tired.)

Examples: Dove abiti? (Where do you live?), Quanti anni hai? (How old are you? — literally “how many years do you have,” using avere from the previous Part’s lesson, just as Spanish uses tener for the same idiom).

Practice Questions