Spanish speakers like me have the opposite problem when learning English 😂 As we only hace 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) with one define sound each and English also have those 5 vowels but with MANY sounds depending on the word (and you have to learn it from memory because there are not consistent pronunciation rules). As a result we tent to pronunce English vowels as Spanish vowels or combinations of those vowels. Also I think in Spanish vowels are stronger when speaking, I'm not sure how to explain it but I think most consonants in Spanish sound softer than vowels (except a few like rr or j). We also tent to add vowels in certain places, ask a Spanish native speaker to pronunce snake and you'll hear "Esnake" or "Spanish" and you will hear "Espanish", that is a classic mistake we do uncounciously when we start learning English and is corrected by English teachers frequently. Also many times vowels are silent in English and we tent to try to pronunce it when we learn a new word until someone corrects us like the second "e" in "Wednesday". We see that word and our Spanish brain thinks it has 3 syllables so that "e" (Wed-nes-day) must be pronunced someway, but the truth is it only has two (Wens- day because d and e are silent). The same hapens with "Every" in order to give another example. When we mimic the English steryotipical accent we combine vocals like "hola amigou" or things like that because we frecuently hear more than one Spanish vowal when we hear English. Sorry for possible English mistakes and typing mistakes because I wrote all this very fast lol
This was super informative as someone learning Spanish. I really appreciate the bit about how you typically imitate stereotypical English accent in a written form. It helps me see how things like a super anglicized "amigo" actually sounds like "amigouugh" or "amigowh" or something similar, which helps reinforce to me how you guys hear syllables more straightforward and consistently. It feels like this helps me feel out the difference in being in the "espanish mode" with my mouth and throat, which sets me up to naturally pronounce things more like a native speaker without having to stress about every individual sound so much. Thanks for sharing.
@@GSPV33 You're welcome, I'm very happy that you find my comment useful. :) I've been studing English for over ten years and I still have a lot to learn. Pronunciation is the most difficult part for me. I recommend you a UA-cam Channel called "Linguriosa", she's a linguist Spaniard who makes videos about Spanish curiosities. She speaks very clearly so her channel is great to practice listening skills for learners. She has a video about the "E" sound behind the S called "¿Por qué los hablantes de español no pueden pronunciar esto del inglés?" If I don't remember wrong. Her channel is great for Spanish students and Spanish native speakers as well. Her videos are very dinamic and you always learn something.
I seriously love this channel. 😃 In all your videos, it's particularly useful when you contrast the English malpronunciations with the correct Spanish pronunciations. Many times I cannot hear the error until I hear them side by side, and then it's like a light bulb turning on. ¡Gracias!
A friend of mine who is a native Spanish speaker pointed this out to me as one of my more obvious pronunciation flaws. Like you said, this is especially obvious with the pronunciation of the letter "a". I do remember pointing out to my friend that when I was attempting to fix my pronunciation of "a", it sounded like I was saying "trábájábá", "ámígá", "ámáblé", "ándá" with all syllables stressed. I didn't realize until watching your video that this problem exists specifically when the vowel is unstressed. This concept makes much more sense now. Have you considered making accompanying videos for English learners? I think this topic would also be very useful for understanding English pronunciation if it were done from the perspective of a Spanish speaker learning English.
I'm so glad you found this helpful. I have considered starting a channel for people learning English. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, because it seems like a lot of work. I spent 6 years studying Spanish in undergrad and graduate programs, and I really know Spanish. I don't know English as well, and I'd have to spend considerable time studying it so my videos were accurate.
When you list the words with all of the accents on the Spanish vowels, that is what he is saying we SHOULD do in this video, correct? I am thinking I should focus on pronouncing the vowels more than the consonants to improve my accent. Is that what you are saying in this post? Or are you saying that your friend who is a native Spanish speaker said this sounded incorrect?
@@dionne3311 Yes and no. In Spanish, one and only one syllable in each word will be stressed. Pronouncing each "a" as if it had an accent mark is incorrect. _But_ for native English speakers, it may be difficult to use the correct vowel sound if you are saying the vowel unstressed. An example, for the English word "afar", the "a"s are pronounced differently. The second "a" has the stress, but it's also pronounced with a different vowel sound. According to Wiktionary, with IPA notation it's written as either /ʌˈfaɹ/ or /əˈfɑː/. I don't have the proper vocabulary for linguistic concepts to properly describe this, but in Spanish the quality of "a" will always be the same. "ʌ" is different to "a" (or "ə" is different to "ɑ"). In English you could have a stressed "ʌ" and an unstressed "a", or you could have a stressed "a" and an unstressed "ʌ" (such as the word "afar"). In Spanish, it will always be "a", even if it's unstressed. I didn't even realize I was changing the vowel sound when I attempted to pronounce "a" unstressed. For me, pronouncing words in a manner such as "trábájábá" helped me understand what I was doing wrong. I was able to pronounce all vowels as "a" instead of "ʌ". But it caused a different problem. I was pronouncing unstressed syllables as stressed. I'll use English pronunciation to describe my problem for the word "amable". Before this exercise I was pronouncing it as "uh MAH blay" (the "uh" is the incorrect vowel but the correct stress). When I was working on my pronunciation it sounded like "AH MAH blay" (stress on "AH" is incorrect, but the vowel sound is correct). It should sound like "ah MAH blay". After focusing on this and practicing this specifically, I was able to improve my pronunciation. Does this make sense?
"Stop reducing vowels" - this is also the advise I would give to any learner of ancient Greek. It is super irritating when you see a people on youtube pronouncing them αγγλιστί and claiming it is "the right pronunciation". That's usually why native Spanish speakers tend to pronounce ancient Greek 10x times better than English ones.
I'm a fluent Spanish speaker and never had a problem with vowel reduction when I was learning the language. However, one of my teachers in high school did these kinds of things all the time. While he knew the language like the back of his hand and was married to a Mexican, his own native English dialect (extremely heavy Bostonian) got in the way of truly good pronunciation in countless ways. It almost drove me nuts, and I doubt he even realized he was doing it!
I was wondering if you could do a video at some point on the syllable-timed nature of Spanish vis-a-vis the stress-timed of English. This is a very obscure topic that I haven't learned about until recently and I am still struggling with it in practice. Thanks for all you do! We love and respect your teaching!
I especially noticed in myself a tendency to reduce an initial vowel followed by an s. Thank you so much for your videos, as it isn't obvious where else to find such a practical guide to Spanish phonology for English speakers . I would also love a detailed video on intonation patterns and the ways native English speakers tend to get it wrong.
As a Chinese high school student learning spanish by myself, I found your videos really helpful!!! Though I m not a native English speaker, I learn spanish through English (because of my good command of english and the similarities between the 2 languages). Your videos have helped me a lot in my pronunciation of spanish
I have some appreciation for how different European languages are from your native language, because I took a couple years of Mandarin when I was in college. I find it very interesting to consider that, from the point of view of a Chinese speaker, English and Spanish have significant similarities. From the point of view of an English speaker, Spanish and English are very different, and the differences are maddening. But, of course, they are similar in deep and important ways, which would be noticeable from the perspective of someone whose native language was quite different.
This may be very basic and not something you’d be interested in but I still figured I’d ask-can you do a video about Si=if and Sí=yes. I simply can not hear any difference in the stress of the pronunciation, even when I ask native Spanish speakers they can’t really explain it well the stress sound.
@@furiogiunta556 I'm not answering for the host of this channel and I look forward to his response (and the responses of native Spanish speakers), but to me as a native English speaker the pronunciation of both words is the same. The difference in spelling is only to distinguish that one is used as an affirmative (yes) and the other as a conjunction (if).
@@tenminutespanish cooool. From my point of view, the pronunciation is kind of similar to my other mother tongue besides mandarin, which is called Wu Chinese (to be specific, Shanghai Dialect). Almost all spanish phonemes can be found in Wu (excluding the r, rr and the d inside of a word). But In Wu, we differentiate 't' and 'd' according to the pitch of a word instead of themselves. As a result, I couldn't distinguish 't' and 'd' in spanish though i can make these two sounds. That was super confusing to me. Thanks to your videos on 't' and 'd', 'p' and 'b', 'c' and 'g'. Though some phonemes are the same (or at least super similar), the way we perceive them are different across Chinese and European languages
Yes yes yes, thank you for attaching a label to this lol. I've practiced specifically not doing this for so long but never knew if it was a thing everyone had trouble with. Thank you so much for the information and can't wait to see the next video!
I can't stress how important this is. AEIOU--that's it, nothing more! Spanish learners take note, since most languages (even Romance languages, and even straight forward Indonesian) will have a larger vowel inventory than Spanish. For those speakers of languages with variable vowel lengths, say English, Czech, Finnish, et al., in Spanish, vowel length has no implication on meaning. However, many dialects of Spanish will have longer or shorter vowel lengths, and along with prosody factors like pitch and rhythm, and other factors, will help identify these accents. For example, in northwestern Mexico Spanish, stressed vowels typically occur with longer length ("Le partíí la maadre.), and unstressed vowels are articulated with lower/normal length--in all cases, despite length and stress, the vowel aperture/quality remains the same. In case where there is a form of vowel reduction, for example, "pues", you will get either a different full vowel from a dipthong or completely eliminate the vowel sound (but no schwa sound). Thus "pues", can turn "pos" or "ps". "Noo, ps, le partíí maadre." (I kicked his ass.) Although the vowel lengths are seen as completely normal, the vowel change is considered colloquial, and of low prestige. The only exception where you may hear vowel reduction among fluent speakers of Spanish is among some US Spanish speakers (some 2nd or past generations of bilingual speakers)--this is a result of English influence, and is typically not looked well upon by other fluent Spanish speakers (although, I don't encourage it, I just accept it as a regional speech).
The fact that I like accents in spanish language,is why this video was a pleasure for me: I could compare my pronnounziation with the anglophone, and the spanophone one, the result is: I tend to put a mother tongue accent on certain middle o's and produce o: , pronounce accentos with more intensity, somtimes pronounce b as v or vw in certain positions, and put a open vowel in words like teléphono (te:lEpho:no) if even thinking about the accent, sometimes I was very close with the spanish word, further I pronounce the d s as d in middle, roll the rs , d as t at the end and when seeying new words tend to mess up badly when reactin quickly, I pronunced a gentlemen g with one of the mentioned words, even though spanish does not have that sound, 😅😆 , I do like my accent though its unique, the accented words like teléphono sounded nice in my opinion.
Hi Dan, I try to copy the speed of native spanish speakers. Even though I know the words and the syntax, I cannot form the letters as quickly. Any suggestions. thank you. great videso
when i started this video, i thought that i didn't do these--a few of the examples with an unstressed "e" maybe? but the section on "ía" made me realize i had been completely neglecting those poor "a"s
Good job identifying areas of improvement. ALL English speakers do this. It's one of the core aspects of the English speaker foreign accent in Spanish.
I'm really happy you like my videos. I'll put out a call for submissions in six months or so. You can submit a recording of your speech for analysis then.
@@tenminutespanish I hope you don't mind that I showed one of your video in my intermediate Spanish classes today. Your explanations are so concise and helpful. Perfect 10. Now that I have heard my vowel reduction in the imperfect tense I am going to fix it before 6 months. 👍
That's because Portuguese has vowel reduction. Of course it's different than English (it very rarely reduces all the way to /ə/) and it varies between dialects.
As @vytah already stated, it varies, but as a native Portuguese speaker I would say Brazilian dialects never reduce vowels, while in European Portuguese, African and Asian dialects the reduction is the norm.
![Spanish Vowels Part I: Discussion, [a], [e]](/img/n.gif)
Spanish speakers like me have the opposite problem when learning English 😂
As we only hace 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) with one define sound each and English also have those 5 vowels but with MANY sounds depending on the word (and you have to learn it from memory because there are not consistent pronunciation rules). As a result we tent to pronunce English vowels as Spanish vowels or combinations of those vowels.
Also I think in Spanish vowels are stronger when speaking, I'm not sure how to explain it but I think most consonants in Spanish sound softer than vowels (except a few like rr or j). We also tent to add vowels in certain places, ask a Spanish native speaker to pronunce snake and you'll hear "Esnake" or "Spanish" and you will hear "Espanish", that is a classic mistake we do uncounciously when we start learning English and is corrected by English teachers frequently. Also many times vowels are silent in English and we tent to try to pronunce it when we learn a new word until someone corrects us like the second "e" in "Wednesday". We see that word and our Spanish brain thinks it has 3 syllables so that "e" (Wed-nes-day) must be pronunced someway, but the truth is it only has two (Wens- day because d and e are silent). The same hapens with "Every" in order to give another example.
When we mimic the English steryotipical accent we combine vocals like "hola amigou" or things like that because we frecuently hear more than one Spanish vowal when we hear English.
Sorry for possible English mistakes and typing mistakes because I wrote all this very fast lol
This was super informative as someone learning Spanish. I really appreciate the bit about how you typically imitate stereotypical English accent in a written form. It helps me see how things like a super anglicized "amigo" actually sounds like "amigouugh" or "amigowh" or something similar, which helps reinforce to me how you guys hear syllables more straightforward and consistently. It feels like this helps me feel out the difference in being in the "espanish mode" with my mouth and throat, which sets me up to naturally pronounce things more like a native speaker without having to stress about every individual sound so much.
Thanks for sharing.
@@GSPV33 You're welcome, I'm very happy that you find my comment useful. :)
I've been studing English for over ten years and I still have a lot to learn. Pronunciation is the most difficult part for me.
I recommend you a UA-cam Channel called "Linguriosa", she's a linguist Spaniard who makes videos about Spanish curiosities. She speaks very clearly so her channel is great to practice listening skills for learners. She has a video about the "E" sound behind the S called "¿Por qué los hablantes de español no pueden pronunciar esto del inglés?" If I don't remember wrong.
Her channel is great for Spanish students and Spanish native speakers as well. Her videos are very dinamic and you always learn something.
i love how your “englishy” pronunciation of spanish words sounds like an adequate european portuguese pronunciation to my brazilian ears
Exactly My thoughs
I seriously love this channel. 😃 In all your videos, it's particularly useful when you contrast the English malpronunciations with the correct Spanish pronunciations. Many times I cannot hear the error until I hear them side by side, and then it's like a light bulb turning on. ¡Gracias!
Thank you so much!
Completely agree with this!
@@brycenichols7189 Thank you!
A friend of mine who is a native Spanish speaker pointed this out to me as one of my more obvious pronunciation flaws. Like you said, this is especially obvious with the pronunciation of the letter "a". I do remember pointing out to my friend that when I was attempting to fix my pronunciation of "a", it sounded like I was saying "trábájábá", "ámígá", "ámáblé", "ándá" with all syllables stressed. I didn't realize until watching your video that this problem exists specifically when the vowel is unstressed. This concept makes much more sense now.
Have you considered making accompanying videos for English learners? I think this topic would also be very useful for understanding English pronunciation if it were done from the perspective of a Spanish speaker learning English.
I'm so glad you found this helpful. I have considered starting a channel for people learning English. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, because it seems like a lot of work. I spent 6 years studying Spanish in undergrad and graduate programs, and I really know Spanish. I don't know English as well, and I'd have to spend considerable time studying it so my videos were accurate.
When you list the words with all of the accents on the Spanish vowels, that is what he is saying we SHOULD do in this video, correct? I am thinking I should focus on pronouncing the vowels more than the consonants to improve my accent. Is that what you are saying in this post? Or are you saying that your friend who is a native Spanish speaker said this sounded incorrect?
@@dionne3311 Yes and no. In Spanish, one and only one syllable in each word will be stressed. Pronouncing each "a" as if it had an accent mark is incorrect. _But_ for native English speakers, it may be difficult to use the correct vowel sound if you are saying the vowel unstressed.
An example, for the English word "afar", the "a"s are pronounced differently. The second "a" has the stress, but it's also pronounced with a different vowel sound. According to Wiktionary, with IPA notation it's written as either /ʌˈfaɹ/ or /əˈfɑː/. I don't have the proper vocabulary for linguistic concepts to properly describe this, but in Spanish the quality of "a" will always be the same. "ʌ" is different to "a" (or "ə" is different to "ɑ"). In English you could have a stressed "ʌ" and an unstressed "a", or you could have a stressed "a" and an unstressed "ʌ" (such as the word "afar"). In Spanish, it will always be "a", even if it's unstressed. I didn't even realize I was changing the vowel sound when I attempted to pronounce "a" unstressed.
For me, pronouncing words in a manner such as "trábájábá" helped me understand what I was doing wrong. I was able to pronounce all vowels as "a" instead of "ʌ". But it caused a different problem. I was pronouncing unstressed syllables as stressed.
I'll use English pronunciation to describe my problem for the word "amable". Before this exercise I was pronouncing it as "uh MAH blay" (the "uh" is the incorrect vowel but the correct stress). When I was working on my pronunciation it sounded like "AH MAH blay" (stress on "AH" is incorrect, but the vowel sound is correct). It should sound like "ah MAH blay". After focusing on this and practicing this specifically, I was able to improve my pronunciation.
Does this make sense?
And remember: No matter how much Spanish you know... Spanish in Argentina has nothing to do, it is amazing though
"Stop reducing vowels" - this is also the advise I would give to any learner of ancient Greek. It is super irritating when you see a people on youtube pronouncing them αγγλιστί and claiming it is "the right pronunciation". That's usually why native Spanish speakers tend to pronounce ancient Greek 10x times better than English ones.
I'm a fluent Spanish speaker and never had a problem with vowel reduction when I was learning the language. However, one of my teachers in high school did these kinds of things all the time. While he knew the language like the back of his hand and was married to a Mexican, his own native English dialect (extremely heavy Bostonian) got in the way of truly good pronunciation in countless ways. It almost drove me nuts, and I doubt he even realized he was doing it!
I was wondering if you could do a video at some point on the syllable-timed nature of Spanish vis-a-vis the stress-timed of English. This is a very obscure topic that I haven't learned about until recently and I am still struggling with it in practice. Thanks for all you do!
We love and respect your teaching!
My very next video will discuss that topic. Thank you for the kind words!
“Quit it” 😂 I love it here
I especially noticed in myself a tendency to reduce an initial vowel followed by an s.
Thank you so much for your videos, as it isn't obvious where else to find such a practical guide to Spanish phonology for English speakers .
I would also love a detailed video on intonation patterns and the ways native English speakers tend to get it wrong.
I love this video. The examples clearly articulate what I need to do to improve my pronunciation.
Thank you! I'm so glad to hear that you found this useful. And as a musician I hope you found the Easter egg reference to jazz music amusing.
As a Chinese high school student learning spanish by myself, I found your videos really helpful!!! Though I m not a native English speaker, I learn spanish through English (because of my good command of english and the similarities between the 2 languages). Your videos have helped me a lot in my pronunciation of spanish
I'm so glad you've found my material useful.
I have some appreciation for how different European languages are from your native language, because I took a couple years of Mandarin when I was in college. I find it very interesting to consider that, from the point of view of a Chinese speaker, English and Spanish have significant similarities. From the point of view of an English speaker, Spanish and English are very different, and the differences are maddening. But, of course, they are similar in deep and important ways, which would be noticeable from the perspective of someone whose native language was quite different.
This may be very basic and not something you’d be interested in but I still figured I’d ask-can you do a video about Si=if and Sí=yes. I simply can not hear any difference in the stress of the pronunciation, even when I ask native Spanish speakers they can’t really explain it well the stress sound.
@@furiogiunta556 I'm not answering for the host of this channel and I look forward to his response (and the responses of native Spanish speakers), but to me as a native English speaker the pronunciation of both words is the same. The difference in spelling is only to distinguish that one is used as an affirmative (yes) and the other as a conjunction (if).
@@tenminutespanish cooool. From my point of view, the pronunciation is kind of similar to my other mother tongue besides mandarin, which is called Wu Chinese (to be specific, Shanghai Dialect). Almost all spanish phonemes can be found in Wu (excluding the r, rr and the d inside of a word). But In Wu, we differentiate 't' and 'd' according to the pitch of a word instead of themselves. As a result, I couldn't distinguish 't' and 'd' in spanish though i can make these two sounds. That was super confusing to me. Thanks to your videos on 't' and 'd', 'p' and 'b', 'c' and 'g'. Though some phonemes are the same (or at least super similar), the way we perceive them are different across Chinese and European languages
Thank you so much. I truly desire to improve my Spanish language skills.
I'm glad you liked the video!
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I didn’t know I did this until you started doing the comparison
Glad you found it helpful. Virtually 100% of English speakers do this.
This scratches my linguistic working brain
Yes yes yes, thank you for attaching a label to this lol. I've practiced specifically not doing this for so long but never knew if it was a thing everyone had trouble with. Thank you so much for the information and can't wait to see the next video!
I'm so happy you liked the video.
I can't stress how important this is. AEIOU--that's it, nothing more! Spanish learners take note, since most languages (even Romance languages, and even straight forward Indonesian) will have a larger vowel inventory than Spanish. For those speakers of languages with variable vowel lengths, say English, Czech, Finnish, et al., in Spanish, vowel length has no implication on meaning. However, many dialects of Spanish will have longer or shorter vowel lengths, and along with prosody factors like pitch and rhythm, and other factors, will help identify these accents. For example, in northwestern Mexico Spanish, stressed vowels typically occur with longer length ("Le partíí la maadre.), and unstressed vowels are articulated with lower/normal length--in all cases, despite length and stress, the vowel aperture/quality remains the same. In case where there is a form of vowel reduction, for example, "pues", you will get either a different full vowel from a dipthong or completely eliminate the vowel sound (but no schwa sound). Thus "pues", can turn "pos" or "ps". "Noo, ps, le partíí maadre." (I kicked his ass.)
Although the vowel lengths are seen as completely normal, the vowel change is considered colloquial, and of low prestige.
The only exception where you may hear vowel reduction among fluent speakers of Spanish is among some US Spanish speakers (some 2nd or past generations of bilingual speakers)--this is a result of English influence, and is typically not looked well upon by other fluent Spanish speakers (although, I don't encourage it, I just accept it as a regional speech).
Great comment! Thanks.
The fact that I like accents in spanish language,is why this video was a pleasure for me: I could compare my pronnounziation with the anglophone, and the spanophone one, the result is:
I tend to put a mother tongue accent on certain middle o's and produce o: , pronounce accentos with more intensity, somtimes pronounce b as v or vw in certain positions, and put a open vowel in words like teléphono (te:lEpho:no) if even thinking about the accent, sometimes I was very close with the spanish word, further I pronounce the d s as d in middle, roll the rs , d as t at the end and when seeying new words tend to mess up badly when reactin quickly, I pronunced a gentlemen g with one of the mentioned words, even though spanish does not have that sound, 😅😆 , I do like my accent though its unique, the accented words like teléphono sounded nice in my opinion.
Hi Dan, I try to copy the speed of native spanish speakers. Even though I know the words and the syntax, I cannot form the letters as quickly. Any suggestions. thank you. great videso
¿[ə] es un alófono de cual vocal en español? Creo que /a/.
[ə] no existe en español. Así que, no es un alófono de ninguna vocal en español.
when i started this video, i thought that i didn't do these--a few of the examples with an unstressed "e" maybe?
but the section on "ía" made me realize i had been completely neglecting those poor "a"s
Good job identifying areas of improvement. ALL English speakers do this. It's one of the core aspects of the English speaker foreign accent in Spanish.
Interesting. I always thought that the AW as in thought sounded more like the Spanish A than the schaw.
It's definitely different in various dialects of English.
So you want me to be born again and hope that I’m born in a Spanish speaking country, basically.
I don't expect anything of you. I communicate information, and you can do with it what you want.
summary: speak phonetically
I want him to pick my accent apart. I hear 2 new errors in my Spanish because of this! I love it. How can I submit my accent?
I'm really happy you like my videos. I'll put out a call for submissions in six months or so. You can submit a recording of your speech for analysis then.
@@tenminutespanish I hope you don't mind that I showed one of your video in my intermediate Spanish classes today. Your explanations are so concise and helpful. Perfect 10. Now that I have heard my vowel reduction in the imperfect tense I am going to fix it before 6 months. 👍
@@georgeadams8719 I'm very flattered. I hope your class liked the video. I'm very happy you like my channel.
The English version of these words sound like Portuguese haha
That's because Portuguese has vowel reduction. Of course it's different than English (it very rarely reduces all the way to /ə/) and it varies between dialects.
As @vytah already stated, it varies, but as a native Portuguese speaker I would say Brazilian dialects never reduce vowels, while in European Portuguese, African and Asian dialects the reduction is the norm.