Saturday, August 1, 2015

Cómo te llamas?

So you make new friends, you need to ask about his/her name, wouldn't you?

Cómo (How) te (You) llamas (Name call youself)? (click on the link for sound)

Well ... um ... I don't really understand this。Why do we use (How, Cómo) to ask this question which should have been asked using (What, Qué)。

People told me that I should just memorize this. But this is just really strange ...

Edit: After writing this I decided to ask this question in the discussion group. Here is the answer.

llamas actually means (called) , so a more literal translation of the sentence is "How is you called", of course, asking it like this is rather awkward in English, I guess, similarly, asking the literal translation of "What is your name" in Spanish (as in Qué es tu nombre) would probably be equally awkward there.

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