SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ¿QUÉ? AND ¿CUÁL?

The differences between ¿qué? and ¿cuál? can be quite problematic for non-native Spanish
speakers, but a few basic rules will help you to avoid mistakes.
¿qué? can be used both as an adjective and a pronoun. This means it can be used with
or without a following noun:
e.g.: ¿Qué hora es? What time (lit. ‘hour’) is it?
¿Qué quieres? What do you want?

¿cuál(es)? can only be used as a pronoun, i.e. it must not be followed directly by a noun:
¿Cuál prefieres?
Which (one) do you prefer?
¿Cuáles de las canciones prefieres?
Which (of the) songs do you prefer?
¿Cuál de ellos tienes ya?
Which of them do you already have?

So you can see that ¿qué? usually corresponds to English ‘what’ and ¿cuál? to English
‘which’. However, you need to be particularly careful when translating the following type
of sentence:
What is the problem?
In this type of sentence the translation of ‘what’ is always ¿cuál? and never ¿qué?
¿Cuál es el problema?

¿qué? is only used in this type of sentence if the question is asking for a definition of
something rather than being equivalent to the question ‘what sort of …?’:
e.g. ¿Qué es esto?
What is this? (asking for a definition)
¿Cuál es la explicación?
What is the explanation?
(asking which of many possible explanations will do)