Lesson 1.6: Spanish sounds and pronunciation rules

We briefly covered the pronunciation of each letter in Lesson 1.1, but some of their sounds are challenging enough that they’re worth covering in a lesson. Also, like English, Spanish has rules about pronunciation beyond the basic letter sounds. You can get by without learning them explicitly, but you’ll be less surprised by words’ pronunciations if you know the rules, so we’ll explain the most important ones here.

Default emphasis

In the previous lessons, we’ve been saying that emphasis is placed on the second-to-last syllable of a word by default. That’s actually a slight oversimplification: words that end in a vowel, N, or S have their second-to-last syllable emphasized, while words that end in another consonant have their last syllable emphasized.

The role of the acute accent is still to change emphasis. For one-syllable words, the emphasis obviously goes on that one syllable.

The J/soft G sound

The pronunciation of J in Spanish (as well as G before E, I, or Y) is similar, but not the same as the English H. J is pronounced /x/, which is a thicker, raspier sound than /h/ that can be produced by contricting the throat a bit.

By the way, isn’t it interesting that G before E, I, or Y makes the same sound as J in both English and Spanish, even though that sound is different in each language? It’s pronounced /dʒ/ in English, just like J, and it’s pronounced /x/ in Spanish, again just like J.

The B/V sounds

B and V are pronounced the same in Spanish, but that pronunciation depends on the letter’s position in a word. They’re pronounced /b/ at the beginning of a word or after M or N, and they’re pronounced /β/ elsewhere. That second sound is produced by starting to make the English B or V sound, but pulling the lips apart before they’ve made full contact. You could say it’s somewhere between /b/ and /w/.

The simple R and trill R

When people think of the most difficult sounds in Spanish, two sounds typically come to mind: the simple R (/ɾ/) and the trill R (/r/), neither of which exists in English.

The simple R (/ɾ/)is the default sound of the letter R, and it’s actually much closer to the English /d/ sound than the English R sound (/ɹ/). Try making a D sound and notice the spot behind your front teeth that your tongue taps. The simple R is pronounced by tapping that exact same spot with your tongue. To practice the pronunciation, try pronouncing Spanish words like caro (expensive) and precio (price), but replacing the R with a /d/ sound. Then make minor adjustments to sound more like recordings of spoken Spanish that you hear on this site or elsewhere.

The Trill R is just the simple R repeated many times very quickly, but this time the movement is vibrations caused by air flowing through your mouth rather than a muscular movement. It will be easier to learn this sound by pronouncing it in a word (we’ll use arroz (rice)) rather than by itself. First learn the simple R, then hold your tongue right behind your front teeth: the same place you tap to make the /d/ sound. Then keep your tongue as relaxed as possible while holding it there, pronounce the /a/ sound for a second, then as you’re transitioning from the A in arroz to the O, blow a bit of air through your mouth and try to let your tongue vibrate. Let it vibrate instead of forcing it: forcing anything will throw off your relaxation. It will probably still take a lot of trial and error, but repeating this method should help you get there faster than trial and error.

The letter R is pronounced /r/ at the beginnings of words or when there are two R’s in a row. Otherwise, it’s pronounced /ɾ/.

The silent U

There are two sequences of letters where the U is usually silent: “gue” (/ge/) and “gui” (/gi/). In fact, the only purpose of the dieresis (ü) is to make U pronounced in these two sequences, where it would otherwise be silent.

Digraphs

Spanish uses a few digraphs, or pairs of letters that form one sound, and a few of them may be counterintuitive for English speakers. The ones that are different from English are:

• ll: /j/ as in llanta (key)
• qu: /k/ as in queso (cheese)
• ai/ay: /aɪ/ as in ayudar (to help)
• au: /au/ as in autor (author)
• eu: /eu/ as in euro (euro)