"What is the price?"
Translation:¿Cuál es el precio?
21 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I believe the accent mark over "á" (or other vowels) s a "tilde". http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/tilde
3556
I know this site is encouraging learners to favor the understood meaning over the literal with examples like this, but sometimes it would be less confusing to just ask for the literal. I see "what" and I naturally want to type "que". If it said "which" I wouldn't have made the mistake and I still would have grasped the understood meaning.
1008
snooker is right. Also, qué is looking for a definition or an explanation. ¿Qué es el précio? would require an explanation of what "precio" means, along the line of: the amount of money you would have to pay to own this article.
Qué asks for a definition, and cuál asks for a certain one of a group of possibilities (even if they are not given or implied.) I usually remember it by thinking how to give a "smart aleck answer" in english. I once asked someone "¿Qué es tu nombre?" And he smartly responded, "the thing people call me." Whereas "¿Cuál es tu nombre?" means, "which (of all possible names) is your name?"
When this sentence was introduced to me the first time, DL have me: cuánto es el precio? And I responded with: how much is the price? And that was marked correct. But when I was given English to translate DL did not accept their own version in Spanish. They came back with "Cual" which sounded right to begin with. I thought the first Spanish version with "cuánto" sounded wrong but DL generated that.