Purpose

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

Lesson Explanation

A genuinely simple fact worth noting immediately: turning a Spanish statement into a yes/no question often requires no word reordering at all — only a change in intonation (rising in speech) and, in writing, the addition of an inverted question mark at the start:

Hablas español. — You speak Spanish. (statement)
¿Hablas español? — Do you speak Spanish? (question)

This upside-down opening punctuation (¿) and exclamation mark (¡) are genuinely required in standard written Spanish — omitting them is a real error, not a stylistic choice.

Common question words:

¿Qué? — What?
¿Quién? — Who?
¿Dónde? — Where?
¿Cuándo? — When?
¿Por qué? — Why?
¿Cómo? — How?
¿Cuánto/a? — How much?
¿Cuántos/as? — How many?

All Spanish question words carry a written accent mark — this distinguishes them from the same words used non-interrogatively. For example, como (without an accent) means “like/as,” while ¿cómo? (with an accent) means “how?” This accent-based distinction is genuinely meaningful, not decorative.

Examples: ¿Dónde vives? (Where do you live?), ¿Cuántos años tienes? (How old are you? — literally “how many years do you have?”).

Practice Questions