When it comes to the Spanish punctuation and beginners learning it, writers of guides do not even touch the subject deeply. Just like in English the sentences in Spanish can end in periods and you can replace them with question or exclamation marks if you need to express a different emotion. But the main difference between the two languages’ is that when you learn Spanish you learn the punctuation signs upside down and you write them at the beginning of the phrase, for example: ¿Cómo está Usted? means How are you?.

Using the inversed punctuation marks may be helpful and not at all odd if you think about it since if you are reading a script or a story you know from the beginning that you will have to act surprised or angry if you have the exclamation mark at the beginning and you do not have to read the whole sentence to see that it was a question and you did not read it like one. The only differences between Spanish and English punctuation concern as I already said the exclamation and question mark, the period, comma, angled quotation mark and dash.

We already know about the inversed punctuation from the beginning of the sentence but what about the end of it? We also use a period at the end of them but when it comes to numerals we use a comma, unlike what we do in English. Also you use a comma to indicate a pause in thought but it is also unnecessary to use between the last item and ‘’y’’(and) although some writers use it in this manner in English.

The other big difference is that Spanish use the dash to separate the lines of each speaker in a dialogue thus replacing the quotation marks. Also in English we write each line of a speaker in a different paragraph and this is not usually done in Spanish. The English quotation marks are similar to the angled quotation marks and serve the same purposes but the only big difference is that in Spanish the other punctuation marks are placed outside the quotation marks.