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
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Learning Spanish involves more than memorizing new vocabulary words.
And although vocabulary is important, other factors influence your language learning success. One of those factors is the ability to produce the sounds of Spanish in a way that communicates. This can be called, “Training your Tongue.”
Training your tongue means learning to produce the sounds of Spanish in the correct way. This means producing the sounds in a way other than the way that you normally do. This skill will decrease the “accent” that you have when you talk to a native Spanish speaker.
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A little effort goes a long way in learning to pronounce Spanish.
For one thing, the Spanish Vowels are uniform (mostly), so just getting those five sounds right improves your Spanish pronunciation by a huge percentage.
Clase Chevere Pronunciation instuctions show the basic Spanish sounds. Mind maps summarize these sounds at a glance.
So, exert a bit of effort in pronouncing Spanish correctly, otherwise you will sound “terrible, stupid and ignorant.”
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Overlearning the basics of a language is crucial to long-term success and crucial to the ability to speak the language.
But, as the language components increase in complexity and sheer vocabulary volume, the amount of material to be learned expands beyond the speed that most human brains can assimilate. Read more…
If you think that Spanish is difficult, look what happens when you try to simplify the language!
Warning: Reading this is not for beginners.
En vista de la evolución del castellano en los últimos años, debido a las aportaciones realizadas por los jóvenes, la Real Academia de la Lengua dará a conocer, la reforma modelo 2004 de la ortografía española, que tiene como objetivo unificar el español como lengua universal de los hispanohablantes. Read more…