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.

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.

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.

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

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!