English Pronunciation and Spanish Speakers: what a power couple!
Are you a Spanish native speaker who’d like to strengthen your bond with English pronunciation?
You’ve come to the right place!
Here’s why:
- you and native English speakers already have so much in common:
- you speak a global language;
- you have regional accents, dialects and vocabulary;
- your language is a ticket to the world, and,
- people from everywhere are striving to learn it.
You just get it!
You and English make the perfect team, but, of course, all good partnerships still have their challenges.
If English pronunciation currently feels more enemy than ally, step right up!
The team at Voice Science is here to show you strategic ways that you and English pronunciation can work together and, in fact, already are.
🕵🏻♀️ Here’s our ultimate guide to English Pronunciation Hacks for Spanish Native Speakers
If we compare English and Spanish pronunciation at face value, it’s pretty obvious that they sound vastly different. When we dig deeper, we realise that a fair number of consonant and vowel sounds cross over between the two (e.g. /n/ and /s/), perhaps with different spelling. So that only leaves the sounds that we need to learn from scratch, right? Not quite!
There is some extra phonetic overlap in some coarticulation processes in Spanish.
coarticulation:
The truth about –ing
Finally, you discover that the sound you need to create is called the ‘velar nasal’ /ŋ/ (umm, what does that even mean?!), and you brace yourself to learn this unfamiliar sound. Meanwhile, the Spanish speech sounds within you are crying out for your attention, shouting, “¡Ya lo tenemos! We already have this sound!”
It turns out that whenever you’ve produced an ‘n’ before a:
- hard ‘c’, nunca
- ‘q’, tranquilo
- hard ‘g’, ángulo, or
- soft ‘g’, ángel
in Spanish, your tongue has been pulling backwards to produce /ŋ/.
¡Increíble! What a useful truquito lingüístico. Aunque it may come as a surprise, please don’t feel ingenu@ if you didn’t notice it sooner; the brain automatically takes care of these processes!
Call me on Zzzoom
Shhhhh
The thing about ‘th’
Do you find yourself constantly replacing English ‘th’ sounds with either /t/ or /d/? Peninsular Spanish has the ‘z’ /θ/ sound, ready to be used in English as the voiceless ‘th’, like in ‘think’. And, fear not, words like ‘miedo’ can also help us with the voiced ‘th’ /ð/ like in ‘that’! If you can feel your tongue lightly touching your top teeth and a bit of vibration between them when you pronounce that ‘d’, your mouth is already well acquainted with this target sound.
Wear Your Coraz(s)ón On Your Sleeve
At Voice Science, we adore accents and regional variations, and hope you do too! Time to embrace them, in all their glory, by paying close attention to distinct elements of different regional Spanish accents. Treat it like a treasure hunt; the gems we find will help with English pronunciation!
A Personalised Pronunciation Audit with our team is such a powerful pronunciation tool on the journey towards pronunciation clarity. It will allow you to finally understand where your pronunciation sits, while also providing clear direction in terms of which specific speech sounds and features would benefit from increased precision. Our pronunciation programs are then your next step, to be guided through the areas of the wonderful world of phonetics that are specifically relevant to you.
rememberClear pronunciation is a wonderful goal, but a fairly vague one until we assess our current situation and implement concrete steps to move forward!
Admirable aspirations
The puff of air needed to produce aspirated /t/ /p/ /k/ sounds, might not sound quite so foreign once we think of aspirated /s/-blends ‘st’, ‘sp’ and ‘sk’ (e.g. fiesta pronounced as fiehta), like in many regions of South America such as Chile, and in Andalucía, Spain.
Master-ing ‘-ing
REMEMBER: Phonetics is the key to making those fine lines thick enough for us to walk along confidently, so we have no doubt that we’ll say the words we mean to.
You say jump!
How to have a happy /h/ sound
Tilde-th do us part
So what does the tilde mean for improving our English pronunciation if English spelling doesn’t use any accents? To put it simply, it means that Spanish speakers have been training their whole lives to be able to not only identify word stress, but also shift it across syllables with ease.
Consider the following three words in Spanish:
- término
- termino
- terminó
Spanish speakers are experts at detecting the syllable-stress difference in each; the strong syllable changes the meaning, so you have no choice but to know exactly where that stress lands. Next time you hear an unfamiliar multisyllabic word in English, before you even consider the sounds involved, simply internalise the stress pattern, the rhythm, using your Spanish-speaker superpowers and half the battle has already been won!
One final detail…
We hope you’ve loved all of those examples as much as we enjoyed compiling them! So far we’ve covered the hidden strengths that Spanish speakers bring to English pronunciation, but it doesn’t stop there…
The best is yet to come
We hope you’ve loved all of those examples as much as we enjoyed compiling them! So far we’ve covered the hidden strengths that Spanish speakers bring to English pronunciation, but it doesn’t stop there…
Join us for part 2 of this Spanish deep dive into English pronunciation for some fundamental tips on:
- how to improve your pronunciation by analysing Spanish sounds that are challenging for English speakers; and
- sounds that fuse together or split up as we move from Spanish to English pronunciation
¡Hasta la próxima!
Want to get your English pronunciation off your screen and into your speech? Complete a Personalised Pronunciation Audit with the Voice Science team for a detailed phonetic analysis of your pronunciation, to map out the pathway of your individualised pronunciation program!
Your Personalised Pronunciation Audit from Cadenza™
Find Out Exactly How to Progress Your English Speaking StrategicallyEver want an entire roadmap to pronunciation success?
There’s no second guessing if you have a Personalised Pronunciation Audit because we will diagnose and prescribe exactly what your English speaking needs at the moment to move forward.
Your Personalised Pronunciation Audit leads you by the hand.
We will identify which one of the 5 Bottlenecks to Pronunciation Clarity you need to overcome now.
It’s simple, clear and clean. It’s fun & engaging.
You can do it right here & right now.