“Training your Ear” when Learning Spanish

Learning Spanish involves more than memorizing new vocabulary words, or learning to pronounce new words like native speakers do.

And although vocabulary is important and fluid pronunciation streamlines communication in your target language, developing an “ear” for the language is crucial for your language learning success.

Besides improving your pronunciation, you need to develop a sensitivity to the language that you are learning. In the case of Spanish, this means listening for specific things that you are not accustomed to pay attention to as a native English speaker.

The things that you need to sensitize yourself to are:

• Stressed vowels and stressed syllables
• Slurred and blended vowels
• Slurred and blended words (Spanish blends words together when vowels and consonants meet, even if these sounds are in different words)
• Context clues in the communication that advise you of the correct gender or case of you response

Your ability to “get Spanish right” and master the language, and your ability to produce the sounds of Spanish in a way that communicates requires that you hear and discriminate these subtle differences. This strategy is called, “Training your Ear.”

Training your ear means learning to pay attention to more than the words and ideas that occur during conversation. Besides helping you to pronounce Spanish in the correct manner, this means listening more (without thinking about what you are going to say while the other person is talking to you.

Not only will this skill decrease your “accent” when you speak with a native, but you will “communicate better” if you “listen better.”

But this task is difficult for language learners. We want to impress others, and we want to portray our skills as competent.

To do this, we often are more concerned about what we are going to say when it is our turn to speak. So, we begin composing our next utterance before the person that we are speaking with finishes talking.

Of course, we miss the clues that the person speaking to us in Spanish gives if we fail to pay full attention.

Note: English speakers have an easier time getting away with not listening fully because The structure of English contains few of these language clues. Of course, this is the reason that native English speakers need to “train their Ear” to perceive the nuances of the Spanish language. In some ways, the limited number of structural clues for the English language desensitizes native English speakers to language subtleties…hence the need to retrain the ear to be sensitive to language clues and cues.

Fortunately for musicians, singers and sound engineers; training an English-only ear to pick up the cues and clues of Spanish proves easy. For the rest of us, we need to focus our efforts.

And, training your ear involves getting over the focus upon new vocabulary and verb conjugations; or rather, to expand your focus.

Even though English and Spanish vocabulary and grammar accomplish similar objectives, each language achieves its goals in different ways.

These are the differences that have to be identified as you listen to Spanish with an “native English ear.”

So, learners new to Spanish must pay extra attention to nuances of the language until they learn which components are important, and which components are optional (but nice to posses).

So, study the nuances of Spanish with a “sensitive ear” and you will be on your way to your goal of communicating fluently.

Sensitizing your “ear for language” increases your ability to communicate, but achieving this level of proficiency takes practice.

What kind of practice?

You can listen to recordings of native Spanish speakers, and identify the nuances.

Then, you can attempt to speak those nuances, and listen to yourself as you speak them.”

These experiments will change your perception, i.e., how you hear the sound.

The factors that involve changing your perception are a sensory skill. This skill can be called, “training your ear.”

Of course, with pronouncing Spanish, stress of the vowel sound in one syllable is also required. And Spanish has better (more uniform, easier) rules for accomplishing this pronunciation task than English. (The topic of an online Clase Chevere presentation.)

For an online presentation that focuses on the rules for pronouncing Spanish word, visit Clase Chevere’s: Spanish Pronunciation.

But, perfecting your Spanish pronunciation requires more than rules.

You need to practice sensitive listening, as well as practice accurate Spanish pronunciation.

Pay attention to the quality Spanish that you hear (in selective and sensitive new ways) to improve your Spanish language fluency.

Related Links:

Clase Chevere | Clase Chevere Blog | Spanish Toolkit Blog | Spanish Conversation Web 2.0 | Language Study Lab Web 2.0 | Clase Chevere Web 2.0 | Spanish Toolkit Web 2.0