Spanish Language Pronunciation

It's interesting to me that I've seen so much interest in the rolling the r post. Spanish language pronunciation is usually very easy and straightforward (once you pick an accent to work on... more on that later.) That trilled r gives more of us english language speakers a problem than anything else. It can be discouraging, but don't give up just because that's hard. You'll either do it or you won't and the worst case if you don't is that you'll have more of an American accent.... Sure you should try to make it better, but look how many people speak English with foreign accents that we still understand. I highlighted those words because that's the goal of communication anyway isn't it?

Anyway, if you've looked through Spanish language dictionaries you will notice that there aren't those pronunciation guides like we have in English language dictionaries. You know why that is? It's because Spanish is really fairly easy to pronounce. There aren't great numbers of rules and exceptions. The vowels and consonants have fairly consistent pronunciations that typically don't have a long a list of correlary pronunciation rules to go along with them.

The only grey area is deciding how to approach some of the vowels. Different parts of the Spanish speaking world treat the ll (double l) differently. Some places you'll hear a soft j sound. Other places you will hear it more as a y (as in the word you) sound.

C is another consonant that can have different interpretations depending on the region. At the beginning of the word it should be the hard c (english k). In the middle of the word, some places you'll hear an s-like c, in Spain though you will hear more of a lisp with a th sound. So a word like conocer could sound like kownoser or kownother (soften up the th a bit so that it's not TOO strong.)

Understanding the pronunciation should be one of those things you work to master first, because studies show that even if you are "just" reading, the auditory area of the brain is active. Most of us think the words as we read and having a correct pronunciation (if only envisioned in your mind) can help improve the odds you'll recognize that word when you hear it spoken.

The Spanish language is fairly well known to have a good orthogrophy (this means that the written languae and spoken language match up very well.) However, you will always find regional accents. I've found that many politicians speaking publicly are more careful to enunciate and pronounce words "correctly". By contrast "man in the street" interviews are likely to uncover all sorts of variations on pronunciaiton of Spanish, just like in English.