Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to form yes/no questions and use Spanish question words correctly, including their required accent marks.

Lesson Explanation

Turning a Spanish statement into a yes/no question often requires no word reordering at all — only rising intonation in speech, and in writing, the addition of an inverted question mark at the start: ¿Hablas español? (Do you speak Spanish?) This upside-down opening punctuation (¿) is genuinely required in standard written Spanish, not a stylistic choice.

Common question words: ¿Qué?, ¿Quién?, ¿Dónde?, ¿Cuándo?, ¿Por qué?, ¿Cómo?, ¿Cuánto/a?, ¿Cuántos/as? (What, Who, Where, When, Why, How, How much, How many). A genuinely important detail: all Spanish question words carry a written accent mark, distinguishing them from the same words used non-interrogatively: como (without accent) means “like/as,” while ¿cómo? (with accent) means “how?”

This accent distinction also applies inside indirect questions and exclamations, not just direct questions with a question mark: No sé dónde está. (I don’t know where he is — “dónde” keeps its accent even without a “¿…?” because it’s still functioning as a question word, just embedded in a statement.)

When a question word is the object of a preposition, the preposition moves to the front along with it — genuinely different from casual English, which often leaves the preposition at the end: ¿Con quién hablas? (Who are you talking with? / literally “With whom are you talking?” — “con” cannot be stranded at the end as in casual English “who are you talking with?”)

Practice Questions