- Forum >
- Topic: Spanish >
- "¿Cuántos hijos tiene ella?"
43 Comments
"How many boys does she have?" should really be accepted. In English we often times use "sons" and "boys" interchangably, especially within less formal context.
Correct but children with no implied relationship to "her." Hijos implies that the speaker is referring to children with a specific relationship to her, not generalized children.
Why is"ella" at the end of the sentence? I would write "Cuàntos hijos ella tiene?"
Subjects typically go after the verb in Spanish questions: http://spanish.about.com/od/sentencestructure/a/sentenceorder.htm
In a real-world situation, you would have the context you need to know that..
If not? You could get more information..
But here we are just translating sentences to get a sense of sentence structure while building vocabulary.
Because with out the assent mark, the meaning changes from how much, or how many to "as much as" example: cuanto (adverb) = as much as - Example: Come cuanto puedas. Eat as much as you can.
The accent signifies it as a question word as opposed to one that is used in non-question contexts. Compare: cuánto vs. cuanto, cómo vs. como, que vs. qué and so forth.
@dkat - re: ...stress when it would stressed naturally?
Hola dkat. You noticed something very important. The Spanish language has accent marks that serve different purposes. In the case of the accent marks that you noticed, they fall on the part of the word that is naturally stressed. So they can't change anything regarding the pronunciation. So why are they there?
In this case, the accent marks are called orthographic accents. Check out this hyperlink.
"Got" is used in a lot of informal contexts in English, it's not technically correct, but it's pretty common. "Got" is used many times in place of "have", so some may say "how many kids does she got?", but it's better to say "have".
The verb is tener (meaning 'to have'), the ending changes depending on who you are talking about. _use tengo for 'I' _use tiene for 'he/she/it/you (formal)
The helping verb "does" is missing and "has" needs to be "have".
"How many sons does she have?"
It's poor english to say "How many sons has she got". I would think that "How many sons has she" should not be counted as an error.
If we add the sentence structure, "How many sons (children) does she have?" to this list, does any one of them break an English grammar rule.
What sounds correct to one person is subjective and varies from place to place in the larger English speaking world.
It's best to base the correctness of sentence construction on rules of grammar which are objective.
140
Are hijos and ninos interchangeable? I thought hijos referred strictly to boys while ninos could be gender neutral.
Hijos can refer to only the male offspring of a particular person or the combination of male and female offspring of a particular person. There is a lot of information in the word hijos.
Niños refers to male children in general or male and female children in general. We don't get the extra piece of information about the parent.
We all have problems with this one lol ... look any one interested to learn togither?
How many sons has she should be correct with the "got" redundant. What do others say?
