How…?
What…like?
According to English Grammar Today (on Cambridge Dictionaries Online),
How …? has 3 different meanings:
1)To ask about someone’s general health or 2) about the condition or state of something, or 3) how people experience something.
What is … like?, on the other hand, has only one: to ask for a description of someone or something (e.g. their appearance, their character, their behaviour.)
What makes this matter complex (at least for me) is that a description can be how we experience something, not only what is the physical/objective description.
That's why in English grammars and online websites, many answers for both types of questions start with 'It is great…' or 'It is nice…' or 'It is cool…' , or 'It's wonderful…' etc.
Of course, the rest of the content of the answer can vary.
My question is:
How was the film (yesterday)?
What was the film like?
If I just wanted to know if the film was either nice or not nice, was either good or not good, giving freedom for the other person to choose the content of her answer, I mean, how did she experience the film or what is the story about, the film genre, the actors etc (description), am I free to choose any of this questions for my enquiry?
Best Answer
What CDO is giving you is typical uses, not restrictive definitions. What precisely (or vaguely) is meant by these utterances is more dependent on the discourse situation than on any specific meaning either of them expresses.
For instance, one of my colleagues may ask me tomorrow "What was the concert like?" I know that she doesn't know anything about the music of Koji Kondo and that what she's really trying to convey is that she remembers my mentioning last week, with some bemusement, that I was taking my son to a performance of music from the Zelda games and she hopes it wasn't too tedious for me. I will reassure her that "We had a really good time".
On the other hand, my son's friends are mostly musicians, and if one of them asks him "How was the concert?" he will probably answer something like "The first trumpet seemed to have chops problems, he had a lot of high entrances and was usually a quarter-tone flat. But the arrangements were very cool, a lot of Debussy in it, and the video synch-up was kick-ass."
Your own phrase, "giving freedom for the other person to choose the content of her answer", expresses the situation admirably. Neither I nor my son pay any attention to how the questions are worded: he and I, and our interlocutors, address our audiences and our social situations.