¿ Gramtca? ¡And! when to use
Do you always put that upside down question mark at the beginning of a question in Espanol? And how would I place an accent mark above a letter?
2 Answers
The answer to your first question is "yes". Once in a while I get lazy, especially when writing to friends and just put one at the end as in English.
You get the accents on SD by going to the bottom of the answer box, you will see the upside down question marks and exclamation points, and also the vowels with accents on them.
When typing in the "comments" section I use "ALT" codes. You need to have a numeric keypad on your computer to do this. When you want "á" for example you would hold down the "alt" key and key in "0225" on your keypad.
Other letters are:
¡ = alt+0161, ¿ = alt + 0191, é=alt+0221, í = alt + 0237, ó = alt + 0243, ú = alt + 0250,
ü + alt + 0252 ñ = alt + 0241.
There are other ways of doing this some of the members have posted answers to this question previously. If you do a search of SD answers you will find them.
Yes about the upside down question mark.
My favorite method for placing accents is with the United States International Keyboard which is an option in the setup of Windows. This keyboard can be chosen when you are going to type Spanish and then you can choose the other one in 2 seconds if you're only going to be typing English for awhile. All the letters stay in the same place, you just have to precede an accented letter with another key such as ' (apostrophe) or "alt" then you type the letter you want. á, é, í, ú, ñ, ¿?, ¡!, ü, etc. I did those letters in about 15 seconds.
If you're going to be switching back and forth between the two languages, you just stay with the U.S. International version, and if you want to insert an apostrophe, for example, you just have to type ' < space >.
Please search in Google for "US International Keyboard" and follow one of the many links which will describe how to set it up and how to use it. It shouldn't take you more than a few minutes, and you only have to do it once.
