We all find it hard when starting a new language, and one of the trickiest things can be pronunciation. What we will do is give you a quick run through of the rules and how they apply them to Spanish words

Welcome to Spanish for beginners, a pronunciation guide, the first thing we are are going to look at is the Spanish Alphabet.

a b c ch d e f g h i j k l ll m n ń o p q r s t u vx y z

Firstly we can see that there is on w, but we do have three new letters that are not in the English alphabet, ch, ll and ń. Lets start with the vowels.

Spanish For Beginners - Pronunciation - The Vowels

Unlike English vowels, Spanish vowels only have one sound.

a is said as in cat, not as in say.

e is said as in beg.

i is said as in feet, not as in sit.

o is said as in not, not as in note.

u is the exception, it has two options! it is said as in cool, unless it is between a g and an i, or a g and an e, then it is silent, even then if it has two dots over it

You might not realize it but you already know hundreds, if not thousands, of Spanish words? In these articles we will highlight all the ways in which the English and Spanish languages share hundreds of words, words that you will be able to use every day.

In the last article we looked at the words that have identical spellings in both languages,and identical meaning, in this article we will look at words which are spelled slightly differently but are so close as to be easily understandable and usable.

There Is No “TH” In Spanish.

There are many Spanish words that looks familiar but are subtly different. This is because you will hardly ever see T and H together in Spanish, so words in Spanish that look unfamiliar may become more obvious when an H is added . Examples of this include; Cathedral comes from catedral, thesis from tesis, marathon from maraton, thermal from termal and autor is author, I bet you can guess what matematico is?

The th sound is replaced by a flat t sound as in hat.

There Is No “TION” In Spanish.

Not only are there no TH words, but the Spanish language has no words that end in TION. This means that instead of edition we have edicion, the T is replaced by a C. when we know this its makes it easy to work out what these words mean; atencion, asociacion, coleccion, adicion, and combinacion.

There are obvious but slight changes in some of the spellings but knowing what to look for will help you identify words.

The sound of the word changes as well as the spelling, the sh sound of a word like edition, changes to a thee sound in edicion.

Adding A Vowel.

Many Spanish words differ from the English version by only one letter, that letter is usually a vowel and it comes at the end of a word. This is because the Spanish language (like many others) assigns a gender to lots of its words, if the gender is male the word ends in an O, if the gender is female it ends in an A.

A Spanish word like apartamento, is obviously apartment, it has been given the masculine ending. Other similar words are; busto (bust, as in sculpture), bulbo (bulb), cataclismo (cataclysm), concepto (concept), candidato (male candidate) and producto (product).

This means that words ending in A have been given the feminine ending, words like; acrobata (acrobat), candidata (female candidate), diagrama (diagram), epica (epic), ilusionista (illusionist) and planeta (planet).

As shown above words like candidate when Spanish can end in either O or A depending on the person being described, but that should not stop you realizing what the word is.

Spanish is a well defined, which means that the rules guiding its use are quite simple, but no language rule is ever water tight, though armed with the knowledge from these articles you should, hopefully, have expanded your Spanish vocabulary.

In this article we aim to provide you with an easy to follow guide on the basics of the Spanish language, concentrating on the differences between Spanish and English sentence structure.

Sentence Structure

If you want to understand basic Spanish you need to know that the main difference between English and Spanish is in the way that sentences are constructed. Firstly let us look at a typical Spanish sentence.

“Me gusta el vino espańol”.

This sentence means;

“I like Spanish wine”.

Did you notice that in the English version “wine” comes after “Spanish”, but in the Spanish sentence “vino” comes before “espańol”? This is because in the Spanish language the adjective (an adjective is word than is used to describe something,in this case we have used “espańol, which means Spanish), always comes after the noun (a noun is basically another name for a thing, in this case “vino” meaning wine).

So if I wanted to say, I like white wine, in Spanish I would say “Me gusta vino blanco”. Blanco means white in Spanish.

The rule applies whether we are referring to a drink or a person.

The English sentence “A Spanish man”.

Would translate in Spanish to “Un seńor espańol”

Have you noticed another difference between the English and Spanish sentences? In the example we have used we can see that “espańol” starts with a lower case, or small “e”, but in English when saying “Spanish” we use a capital “S”, this is because any reference to a country in English should have a capital letter at the start of the word, but in Spanish you would only use a capital letter when using the countries name directly.

If we say “Soy de Espańa”

This translates as,

“ I am of Spain”

Because we used “Espańa” which is the name on the country it gets a capital letter. Therefore if I say;

“Soy am

There are three basic groups of Spanish verbs, in these articles we will look at the regular AR, ER and IR verbs.

A verb is a word that means everything from an action to an opinion, so laugh, go, like, hate, love, drink, fall, smile, hear, write turn, are all examples of verbs. In English the verb is not changed by who is doing the action. As an example;

In these phrases, “I like cheese”, “we like cheese” and “you like cheese”, the verb “like” stays the same. In Spanish the form of the verb is changed by who is doing the doing. It might sound odd now but it will make sense later!

So lets look at the three main verb types in Spanish. They are the verbs that end in the letters ar, er and ir. they can then be subdivided into regular and irregular. As we are just starting we will stick to the regular verbs.

Verbs That End In AR

In the Spanish language the group of verbs that end in ar are the most common, so they are a good place to start.

If we use the Spanish verb TOMAR, it means a few different things, but in our case it means to drink. To say “I drink wine” in Spanish we would remove the a and r , then to add an o. to give us “tomo vino”. You could add yo ( the Spanish word for I) at the start of the sentence but it would be unnecessary.

To say “you drink wine” to a single person, again remove the a and r, and add as, to give “tomar vino”.

If we wanted to say that he or she drinks wine, then we remove the ar and add just an a, to give us “toma vino”. This version of tomar would also be used in a formal situation, or if talking to someone for the first time.

When learning our basic Spanish verbs and wanting to say “we drink wine” we add amos to give us “tomamos vino”.

If we wanted to refer to a group when using “you drink wine”, we would add

There are three basic groups of Spanish verbs, in these articles we will look at the regular AR, ER and IR verbs.. In this part we will concentrate on regular ER and IR verbs in the present tense.

In Part 1,we learned that a verb is a “doing” word that covers everything from an action to an opinion, so sing, drink, eat,, like, dislike, love, kick, fall, smile, hear, write turn, are all examples of verbs. In the English language the verb is not changed by who is doing the action. An example would be;

“I like cheese”, “we like cheese” and “you like cheese”, the verb “like” stays the same. In Spanish the form of the verb is changed by who is doing the action.

In the first part we concentrated on regular verbs ending in the letters a and r. The other two groups of regular verbs are the verbs that end in er and ir.

Verbs Ending In ER

One of the words meaning to repair in Spanish is rehacer, if we want to say “ I repair cars” in Spanish, we drop the e and r from the end of rehacer and add an o, to give “rehaco los coches”(los coches, is literally the cars). There is no need for the Spanish word for I (Yo) at the beginning of the sentence because by adding the er, we have changed the verb to referrer it to me.

If we wanted to say “you repair cars” to one person, we would remove the er and add es. giving us “rehaces los coches”, there is no need to use t