¿Cuándo te vas?
To ask "when are you leaving?" in Spanish, say ¿Cuándo te vas?
¿Cuándo te vas? asks a person you know well when they are going to leave, whether that means leaving a party, a town or the country.
What does it mean word for word?
Cuándo means when and te vas means you are leaving, from a reflexive verb meaning to go away.
How does it change in a sentence?
te vas is the informal singular you form. With someone you address formally, or with a group, both the pronoun and the verb ending change.
What mistakes should you avoid?
Keep the written accent on Cuándo, a question word always carries it. Written Spanish also opens the question with an upside down question mark.
Did you know?
- While ¿Cuándo te vas? is a direct question, saying it with a falling intonation in some dialects can function as a polite way to hint to a guest that it is time for them to leave.
- The upside-down question mark ¿ is a unique feature of Spanish. It was introduced by the Real Academia Española in the 18th century to help readers identify the start of a question in long sentences where the word order does not change.
- The word cuándo shares an ancestral root with the English word 'cue', as both stem from the same Latin origin.
Sources
- Word origins: Wiktionary entries cuándo, te, CC BY-SA 4.0.
