How does spanish sound to foreigners

Does Spanish sound like other Romance languages? Pages: 1 2 Next page.

As much as they try, we see that our students find it difficult to pronounce some sounds more than others. And when pronouncing different words in Spanish, there are also some difficulties, though fully surmountable. We will tell you the most difficult sounds when learning Spanish for foreigners. Any language has different words, letters or endings of words that can become a nightmare for foreign students. Based on repeating and understanding , you can overcome these difficulties and learn to pronounce words normally. When you learn Spanish in Spanish-speaking countries you can practice the difficult sounds and you will gradually overcome them.

How does spanish sound to foreigners

When Spanish words are pronounced by a native speaker — be they from Argentina, Colombia, Spain, or elsewhere — the language has a certain musicality that gives it a real charm. But, as foreigners, our efforts to replicate these sounds are often nothing short of a complete disaster. We butcher the accent and destroy what was once a quite beautiful tongue. Less than ideal. There are a whole bunch of techniques we can use to improve the sound of our Spanish, and to begin to imitate that pleasant sing-songy tone of the real thing. Idahosa Ness, who coaches people on how to improve their Spanish pronunciation , believes that accent is one of the most important things to master if you want to connect with others when speaking Spanish. People naturally gravitate towards others that sound like them, he says, meaning a native speaker will be much more likely to talk to you, get on with you and form a friendship with you, if your way of speaking resembles their own. This has largely been my experience too. Native speakers are more impressed by a reasonable accent than by flawless grammar. Where then to start on your journey to improving your accent in Spanish? With Spanish spoken in so many different countries, there are a whole range of different accents, sounds and local variations between them.

So keep the generalizations on the minimal.

Today, it is a global language with about million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain , and about million when including speakers as a second language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico. Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance language group , in which the language is also known as Castilian castellano. The group evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, [9] and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo , a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile , in the 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred on the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas.

The same letters and combinations of letters are always pronounced the same way. All you need to do is to get to know some rules and how to pronounce Spanish letters and letter combinations. The Spanish alphabet has 27 letters, one more than the English one. Can you spot the extra letter? Although there are 27 letters, there are more sounds, as some letters in combinations can produce different sounds. As you can see most of the letters only have one pronunciation. Some of them have two or three, but always in the same letter combinations. You make the Spanish vowel sounds by letting your breath out of your mouth without closing your throat or touching top lip to bottom. There are only five vowels and—as you can see in the sound chart above—they correspond to five sounds:. Remember that Spanish vowels are always short.

How does spanish sound to foreigners

In this comprehensive post, I will share the benefits of improving your Spanish pronunciation to achieve better speaking fluency. Despite being equally important as grammar or vocabulary, the ability to work with sounds does not receive enough importance in foreign language learning. Or else when it does, pronunciation training focuses for the most part on the articulation of vowels and consonants. Let me walk you through the importance and the benefits of pronunciation in language learning and how you can start optimizing your Spanish pronunciation in 5 steps. You might have heard many times that Spanish is a phonetic language and, unlike English, is written the same way as it is spoken. In fact, the idea that phonetic equals straightforward and easy to pronounce is a widespread misbelief not only among students but also among some teachers. But strictly speaking, it would be incorrect to simply affirm that Spanish is a phonetic language and English or French is not. Phonetics is about the sounds of language. And therefore, all languages are phonetic languages except for sign languages. And while some languages are more phonetically consistent than others, they rarely have a perfect correspondence between the written and spoken forms.

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Sha, Mandy ed. In Western Sahara , formerly Spanish Sahara , a primarily Hassaniya Arabic -speaking territory, Spanish was officially spoken as the language of the colonial administration during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Archived from the original on 27 September Spanish continued to be official and used in Philippine literature and press during the early years of American administration after the Spanish—American War but was eventually replaced by English as the primary language of administration and education by the s. US Virgin Islands. Your accent, on the other hand, is immediately noticeable to everyone. Ethnologue gives estimates of the lexical similarity between related languages in terms of precise percentages. Spanish language has a long history in the territory of the current-day United States dating back to the 16th century. Variation and Change in Spanish. I recommend practicing pronouncing these sounds while holding a pen across your back teeth, as far back in your mouth as possible. Retrieved 26 July Retrieved 3 December Consultado el 23 August Retrieved 7 July Archived from the original on 2 April

Discover the characteristics of foreign languages, the challenges of pronunciation and accent, and the impact of cultural associations on language perception. Learn strategies for understanding foreign languages and overcoming communication barriers.

Archived from the original on 8 February Archived from the original on 26 June Archived from the original on 16 August It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Spanish, including vocabulary from Hebrew , French, Greek and Turkish , and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. One helpful exercise, even for the completely tone deaf, is to do some private karaoke and start singing along with your favourite local tunes. The fact that greek isn't a romance language is irrelevant. Archived from the original on 23 September Sometimes generalizations have inaccurate consequences when speaking of Spanish. Where Latin had -li- before a vowel e. Retrieved 26 July Spanish doenst sounds like italian.