The way in which you will form a question depends on both how much information you already have and how much information you want to receive.
Sometimes you just want to know if the information you have is correct or not. In this case you ask a yes/no question. Look and listen carefully at the examples below to see multiple ways to form questions.
| verb + | subject + | subject’s modifiers + | verb’s modifiers |
|---|---|---|---|
 ¿Compra |
el amigo | de tu novio | mucha ropa? |
| ¿Es |
Juan Pablo | de Argentina? | |
| ¿Es |
Rocío | analista de sistemas? | |
| ¿Canta |
Gloria Estefan | música latina? | |
| ¿Cocina |
Emilio | bien? |
When you are asking a question is important to use the right intonation pattern, which means that the tone of your voice rises at the end.
The intonation is a very important feature because you also can form a yes/no question using the basic sentence pattern given in the very beginning by changing only the intonation.
Sometimes you want to know when, why, where, how something happened. In this case, you have to follow this pattern:
| interrogative word + | verb + | subject + | subject’s modifiers + | verb’s modifiers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ¿Cuándo |
baila | Juan | salsa? | |
| ¿Por qué |
camina | José | en el parque? | |
| ¿Cómo |
es | el salón | de clase? | |
| ¿Dónde |
nada | María | los fines de semana? |
Like in the previous case, you can formulate the question utilizing the basic Spanish sentence pattern with the appropriate intonation, which is the one explained above.
Candela Citations
- Lesson 2 estructuras gramaticales. Authored by: Open Learning Initiative. Provided by: Carnegie Mellon. Located at: https://oli.cmu.edu/jcourse/lms/students/syllabus.do?section=037856eb80020ca6007833f93f06cd13. Project: Spanish1. License: CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
