questions with like

Some basic questions Spanish speakers may ask can cause occasional problems in English because English only has one word, to be, where Spanish has two, ser and estar.

First, we know that “¿Cómo está él?” is “How is he?”, as we learned it in the first weeks of class.

But then we have the question “¿Cómo es él?” Our first reaction is to translate literally, but there we have a problem…