Chloe's Test Tutorial

2. La Puntuación (Punctuation)

The following are some rules for punctuation in Spanish that are different than what you may be used to in English:

1. Question marks and exclamation points are also written at the front of a sentence/phrase, but they are upside-down. For example: ¡Hola! ¿Cómo está usted?
2. Accent marks are extremely important in Spanish since they tell us how to pronounce a word, and sometimes even tell us what a word means. For example: esta = this, but está = is.
   1. The accent mark/stress mark is always written the same way: ´
   2. Accent marks are written over question words such as "what" and "when": ¿Qué? ¿Quién?
   3. These words only carry the accent mark when they are used to ask questions, never when they are used to give information. For example: ¿Qué dice la madre? (What does the mother say?) Ella dice que tiene una hija. (She says that she a daughter.)
3. When an accent mark is written over a word with only one syllable, it is to distinguish that word from another without an accent mark For example: el = the, but él = he; si = if, but sí = yes.

try it

Listen to the following clip and repeat back the sentence.

Now listen to this response and repeat it back.