Basics - Pronunciations.

“You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you’re going to have a strong superstructure” – Gordon B. Hinckley

Even one of the best Spanish teachers and corporate trainers do not hesitate to take a look at their basics. Basics build your skills inside out. Whether you’d want to communicate with a Spanish professional or a tourist in your own country, write big essays or appear for oral examinations, you do need to hit the right source.

You’ll find tons of pages on google that will show you the basics haphazardly without any prior knowledge. The most common “basics” you’ll see are the common phrases used in your day to day lives such as “como estas?”, “buenos dias”.

No. Don’t ever start from there because if you don’t know how to pronounce it, trust me, it sounds terrible. So today’s blog will be dedicated to pronunciations in Spanish.

Picture source: Duolingo* comments. 


-Start from each alphabet followed by their pronunciations. Say it loudly. Thrice. Do this everyday.
-In Spanish, there are different kinds of pronunciations. Certain rules that need to followed and could be categorized as exceptions So I'm making this as lucid as possible for you to get a hang of the different crucial pronunciations.

1. The mark above the 2nd "N" is called a "Tilde". As mentioned, from neh, it becomes "nyeh". Lets take an easy example. A boy in Spanish is called "Nino". Here the Tilde "~" will come above the 2nd "n". This doesn't pronounce it as 'Nee-Noh". In Spanish, we refer it as Ni-nyoh".

2. Similarly, the double L "ll" becomes "yeah". Like we say "Yeah", the mono-syllabic slang in response to a question. Say "What is your name?" We translate it as "Como te llamas?". So you pronounce it as "Yeahmaas". Otherwise the single L remains the same.

3. The Spanish "G"

• Sometimes, the "g" can be pronounced much like the "g" in "fog" or "configure." Note that in both of those English words, the "g" is pronounced somewhat softer or less explosively than the "g" in words such as "goat" and "good."
• However, when the g is followed by an "e"or an "i" it is pronounced something like the letter "h," the same as the Spanish "J". Example, "gente" becomes "hentay" (people). Also "Ham" in Spanish is "Jamon" but is pronounced as "Hamon".
• An easy way to remember this is that in English, the "g" usually has the "j" sound when it comes before an "e" or "i," what we often call the soft "g" sound.

Note the differences in these phonetic transcriptions. The first three have the hard "g" sound, while the final two have the "h" sound:

• apagar — ah-pag-GAR  (to switch on)
• ego — EH-goh 
• ignición — eeg-nee-SYOHN (ignition)
• gente — HEN-tay        (people)
• girasol — hee-rah-SOHL (sunflower)

4. In the majority of Spanish words with a U, the sound you need to make to represent the U is like a   double “oo” in English and rhymes with the English word “too”.
Here are two examples of words with the typical pronunciation of the Spanish letter U:

• Lugar - "Loogaar" (place)
• Mucho - "Moo-cho" (a lot)

In contrast, the letter U is silent in Spanish words when it is next to a Q or placed in between a G and an E or a G and an I as gui and gue. Examples:

• Porque - "Por-kay" (because)
• Pequeno -"Pay-kay-nyoh" (small)
• Seguir - "Say- geer" (follow)
• Guerra - "Gee-yerr-aa" (war)

5. "Y" - In Spanish, Y itself literally means "and" and is pronounced as "ee".


Here, I'd like to end my first session. Incase, any doubts, please leave your comments below.

In the next post I will talk about articles and prepositions in short.



Bro tip: Ask your teachers to start speaking to you in Spanish in the a semester or two. It'll be hard but you'll get used to it.


Hasta la vista.