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.