Preguntas - Spanish questions: Lesson two

Asking questions in Spanish is pretty straightforward. There are two main kinds of questions:
General questions (YES/NO Questions):
There are 3 ways to ask these questions:

1. Form a sentence and put question marks around it (when writing) or raise the intonation of your voice at the end (when speaking).

¿(Tú) tienes hambre? = Are you hungry?
¿María está aquí? = Maria is here?
2. Invert the subject and verb
¿Tienes (tú) hambre? Are you hungry?
¿Está María aquí? Maria sa here?

2. Invert the subject and verb

¿Tienes (tú) hambre? Are you hungry?
¿Está María aquí? Maria sa here?

3. With a question that you're pretty sure will get a yes answer, you can use one of the following tags at the end:

¿no? = no?
¿verdad? = true/right?
¿no es verdad? = that's not true/right?

e.g. Tienes hambre, ¿verdad? = You're hungry, right?
María está aquí, ¿no? = Maria is here, isn't she?

Information questions:
Information questions are more complicated; they ask for more information, such as who, what, when, where, why, how, which, for what, etc.

Some common information question words:

Quién =Who
Qué =what
Cuándo =when
Dónde =where
Por qué =Why
Como = How

In order to make a question with quién, simply use it to replace the subject of the sentence and use the third person singular form of the verb.

Tú tienes hambre.= You're hungry
¿Quién tiene hambre? Who is hungry?
Maria está aquí.= Maria is here?
¿Quién está aquí? = Who is here?

Making a question with the other question words is similar to #2 in general questions: Say the question word, then invert the subject and verb.

¿Dónde estás? = Where are you?
¿Qué hacen ellos? = What are they doing?
¿Cuándo vamos a comer? = When are we going to eat?

* Note that Spanish has a two-part question mark: an upside-down question mark ¿ at the beginning of the question and ? at the end.
* Also note that the subject pronoun is optional.

We hope you enjoyed your Spanish asking questions lesson!

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