Many foreign language students make the mistake of rushing into a new language. Well, I can’t blame them. It’s exciting to learn a new language. However, there’s no point to learning a new language if no one is going to understand you. In some languages, just being slightly off can change the meaning of what you want to say. For example, with Chinese, a language spoken in four tones. But even if you’re studying a straightforward language like Spanish, which has one and only one way to pronounce each letter (unlike English!) you still want to be able to pronounce well and sounds as close as possible to a native speaker. Not only does it make the communication process much easier, but it builds confidence when others are complementing you on your pronunciation skills. You’ll feel more native and have more motivation to keep going.

There’s nothing worse than putting in a lot of hard work studying a language – and it’s hard work – and being asked to repeat what you’re trying to say. Maybe I would be able to understand others, but then again, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to. We tend to become accustomed to the sounds that we hear and so, if we are continuously pronouncing a word incorrectly, we’re only going to become used to that sound and when we hear it pronounced correctly, it may come across wrong.

So, I definitely recommend learning how to pronounce words correctly, as close to as native as possible! Spanish pronunciation is not that difficult except for the famous rolling “r” sound.

Click here to review Spanish pronunciation.

So, your first lesson is to review the Spanish alphabet and learn how to pronounce each letter correctly. The key is repetition. When I started learning Spanish, I made this my priority. Start slow through the alphabet and try to pronounce each letter correctly, then as you get better, speed up!

But don’t worry, this takes time and if you keep at it, and you really focus on your Spanish pronunciation, you will get it and you’ll feel great when you get compliments from native Spanish speakers telling you how well you speak. Trust me, it feels great!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 8:54 am and is filed under Spanish Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.