Learn Spanish (Spain): ¿Quieres más café?

¿Quieres más café?

Do you want more coffee?

Breakdown of ¿Quieres más café?

el café

the coffee

querer

to want; to love (a person)

más

more; else (anything else, nobody else)

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Questions & Answers about ¿Quieres más café?

Why is there no word for "Do" or "you" in this sentence?

In English, we use "Do" to ask questions, but Spanish doesn't use a helper verb like that. As for "you," the ending of the verb quieres already tells us who is wanting. Because it ends in -es, we know it means "you want," so the word tú (you) is optional and usually dropped.

I know the verb to want is "querer". Why is it spelled quieres with an "ie"?

Querer is a "stem-changing" verb. This means that for most forms, the e in the middle changes to ie. So instead of "queres," it becomes quieres (you want). You will see this a lot in Spanish, like with tener becoming tienes.

Why does the word más have an accent mark?

The accent mark helps tell it apart from another word. Más with an accent means "more." There is also a word mas without an accent that means "but." Whenever two short words are spelled exactly the same but have different meanings, Spanish uses an accent mark on one of them.

Don't Spanish nouns usually need "el" or "la" before them? Why isn't it "más el café"?

When you are talking about an unspecified amount of something (like "some coffee" or "more coffee"), you don't use the definite article el or la. You can just put más directly next to the noun, making it más café.