Severn Spanish

Questions I/II: Responding

 

Introduction

You should be familiar with the structure of questions in Spanish and with the common question words before you move on to this section. If you need a review of those topics, see the options to the right.

 

Answering questions

Answering questions is an inevitable part of language, whether written or oral. You need to be able to hear or read a question and then respond appropriately. Some questions are simple -- you are probably already familiar with things like ¿Cómo estás? or ¿Dónde está el baño? Others, however, are more complicated, and we will focus on those: ¿Vas a viajar a México para celebrar el cumpleaños de tu papá?

When answering questions, it can help to deconstruct them. There are three basic steps to doing so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most important thing to remember is that you do not need to be 100 percent sure about the finer details of the question in order to answer it well. You just need to understand the basic gist of what is going on.

Let's go back to our original example and break it down piece by piece: ¿Vas a viajar a México para celebrar el cumpleaños de tu papá?

1. Question word: none

2. Subject and main verb: This is tricky because you can spot 2 verb groups. The first is vas a viajar and the second is celebrar. However, celebrar does not have a subject, so it cannot be the main verb. Therefore, the meat of the question is vas a viajar.

3. The fluff: We can break the rest of the question down into chunk to understand the specifics a little better. We will start with what we have already figured out.

a) vas a viajar = are you going to travel

b) a México = to Mexico

c) para celebrar = to celebrate

d) el cumpleaños de tu papá = your dad's birthday

Our whole question is therefore: Are you going to travel to Mexico to celebrate your dad's birthday?

 

Many questions without question words can technically be answered with sí or no. When there is a Q-word involved however, you will be expected to introduce new content, not just a yes-or-no answer. Take a look.

¿Qué van a hacer ustedes en la playa este fin de semana?

1. Q-word: qué = what

2. Subject and main verb: There is only one verb group going on, which makes our job a little easier. It is van a hacer and the subject is ustedes (remember that the subject follows the verb in a question).

3. The fluff:

a) qué van a hacer ustedes = what are you all going to do

b) en la playa = at the beach

c) este fin de semana = this weekend

We end up with: What are you all going to do at the beach this weekend? As you can see, we cannot simply say sí or no to this; we need to introduce new information: Vamos a nadar en el océano. (We are going to swim in the ocean.)

When you answer a question like that, make sure that you conjugate your verb correctly. Often, you can use the same verb that was used in the original question, but you need to conjugate it differently. In our example above, the verb in the question matched ustedes, and the verb in the answer matched nosotros/nosotras.

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