Grammar - Punctuation Marks!

However, the sentences that ask a question and the sentences that show emotions are treated differently in that in Spanish, these sentences begin with a punctuation mark and end with a punctuation mark. Let’s look at the following two examples.

¿De dónde eres tú? (Where are you from?)

¡Adiós! (Good-bye!)

Notice that there are two question marks and two exclamation points. The first marks, however, are shown upside down. If you do not have the first punctuation marks when writing Spanish, the entire sentence is considered to be wrong so these marks are critical to writing in Spanish. Outside of the question mark and the exclamation point, all other punctuation marks work the same in Spanish as they do in English. So now let’s look at how to say each of those punctuation marks.

Again, you can see that the same punctuation marks that occur in English also occur in Spanish and they are used the same way as in English except for the exclamation point and the question mark.

Notice that there are two words that can be used for apostrophe. In fact, there are three because in some Spanish cultures they will also say apóstrofe. However, when referring to the actual punctuation mark, the most common usage is that of apóstrafo.

Now that you have had a chance to review punctuation marks, move on to the quiz section. For each sentence given, you will need to find which punctuation mark should be used where a blank line or lines are shown in the sentence.