Blanca Quintero
Have you ever took your car to go shopping or met some friends, and suddenly realized you’re heading to work or somewhere else you frequently visit?
When you speak your first language, you don’t think about how to place your mouth.
It’s like driving.
You’ve done it so many times that it just comes automatically.
The letter P is one of the easiest: it’s always pronounced the same way, [p], but different from the English P (as in pin or pool).
One of the first things we learn when we study a foreign language is the alphabet – perfect, we can spell but can you pronounce the letters of the alphabet accurately?
There are different reasons why you have a terrible accent but most of the mispronunciations are the consequence of reading a symbol (letter) and saying it as we’d do in our native language.
And it’s very tough to shut that association (letter-sound) off.
For example, most English natives pronounce the letter B in “la bota” (SP) as the English B in “a boat” (EN) (error!)
Your brain did the effort to learn this association a long time ago, and now, when you see the letter B, you don’t think how to pronounce it.
Your mouth produces the sound automatically.
The problem is that English, Vietnamese, or Spanish native speakers read and pronounce multiple letters in a different way so you’re likely to produce the wrong sound if you speak in Spanish or any other foreign language.
You probably heard that, in Spanish, we pronounce the words as we spell them.
It’s a lie.
Some people may disagree and they will say “Spanish is a phonetic language” -and they’re quite right. Nonetheless, less than half of the letters of the Spanish alphabet are always pronounced the way they’re written.
It’s mathematics:
In Spanish, the letters B and V have the same pronunciation, but it changes depending on their position in a word (or sentence).
However, most of Spanish natives don’t realize that they pronounce them in 2 different ways -and none of them sounds as in English.
Lots of kids have spelling problems with these 2 letters because they are pronounced the same.
Natives can normally guess what you mean if you pronounce them wrong but the pronunciation of the letters V and B tells apart Spanish native speakers. And mispronouncing them may cause some misunderstandings since English B sounds similar to the Spanish letter P -you have some examples at the end of the post.
Have you ever tried to say a Spanish word but it sounded weird and you didn’t know why?
For years I tried to say in English the word “pronunciation” accurately. I used to produce every single sound quite clearly but the word still sounded strange and I didn’t understand the reason.
I wasn’t able to say that word without such a terrible Spanish accent.
Nobody told me that I was doing wrong.
Did you know that almost half of the sounds we pronounce when speaking Spanish are vowels?
In Spanish, vowels are the most important part of a word. If you pronounce them wrong, it’ll be difficult to understand.
In this post, you’ll find:
Diphthong, triphthong, hiatus… These words sound complicated.
Why are they so important?
Why do you need to know how to recognize them? Actually, you don’t need it; unless you want to pronounce Spanish correctly, of course!
![tips to pronounce the letter J in Spanish sound [X] advice and hacks with examples and mouth and throat position](https://blancaquintero.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/How-to-pronounce-the-letter-J.jpg)
