Question relating to forming questions in Spanish!
I am a few chapters into the 1949 edition of The Berlitz Self-Teacher, Spanish Edition, and have come to become seriously confused about an issue related to forming questions in Spanish.
So, my understanding of forming sentences is that the noun comes before the adjective, like El lapiz rojo. And I thought this same rule would apply to questions, but in the book it has the question ?Es corto el lapiz rojo? (don't know how to upside down question mark with keyboard), along with others, with an adjective (corto) coming before the noun (lapiz), which is yet preceded by another ajective (rojo). Looking at this, I figure that the question should be formed ?Es el lapiz rojo corto?, and my thought is confirmed with most of the online translators. Yet this awkward way of forming a question continues in the book. To make matters even more confusing, they have the question ?Es Mexico grande o pequeno? which has the adjectives coming after the noun, which I thought to be correct, yet it's contradicted with the first question I showed here.
Could someone please help me with this?
Thank you.
2 Answers
Hello Adam
Welcome to SpanishDict forum 
Spanish is a beautiful language isn't it? Yet, for many beginners and inexperienced students it can also be quite confusing and frustrating at times, until you come to accept that the grammar rules will not conform to the pattern we have come to expect with English!
Spanish grammar, in my experience, particularly syntax which is the word order is more flexible than English syntax and often allows for the same question to be written in more than one way
So you can either say: ¿Es corto el lapiz rojo? or ¿Es el lapiz rojo corto?
The meaning doesn't actually change as a consequence of re-ordering the words!
You do sometimes have to careful how you change the sentence order of soem sentences because you could iunintentionally change the meaning of some sentences or create, through a nuance, a subtle change of meaning.
You want to know about adjective placement?
Generally speaking, in Spanish most adjectives follow the noun / are placed after the noun, as in French, but some adjectives are placed before the noun, while still others can be placed either before or after the noun but the meaning changes according to whether it comes before or after the noun.
I hope that I haven't lost you ...
I would suggest/recommend that take a look at the grammar section in SpanishDict in order to understand more about this topic. You can follow this link:enter link description here
I hope this helps you
Feliz, your answer was excellent. I see it now as simply an issue of flexibility in regard to adjective placement in questions. Thank you for your help, and I like your avatar. Praise Jesus!
