The Spanish Pronunciation Guide
Welcome to my interactive Spanish Pronunciation Guide. Below you will find a representative sampling of certain aspects of ordinary Spanish speech that constantly pose comprehension problems for students of the language--even fairly advanced students--who have limited opportunities to hear and to practice Spanish as spoken in conversational settings. To help offset this limitation, each sample in the following presentation is linked to its own audio file, thus providing a live illustration of phonetic issues you need to be aware of. This presentation assumes that you already know the correct pronunciation of individual vowel and consonant sounds in Spanish. And for now, you needn't worry about how Spanish words are syllabified and stressed, although you might eventually want to look at my detailed explanation of these subjects in the full, printed version of my Pronunciation Guide, separately available for the first issue of every series of Puerta del Sol since 1995.

Before we get started, let me briefly summarize what you should be looking for in this presentation.

Meaningful language does not normally consist of individual isolated words but rather of a succession of phrases. But here's precisely where the trouble begins: One inevitably tends to approach the study of Spanish from printed rather than oral sources, thus learning foreign words one at a time, as discrete, isolated units, with nice, neat boundaries of silence before and after each one, corresponding to the blank spaces that isolate words printed on a page. The blank spaces that set off printed words certainly make reading easier, but they are, in a sense, just as artificial as those little boundaries of silence that even advanced learners tend to insert in their Spanish speech. (People who have learned Spanish strictly by ear are blessedly uncontaminated by this print-induced problem.) In short, the boundaries between words you've learned from printed sources--including Puerta del Sol transcriptions--have to be discarded, or mentally (and vocally) rearranged, when those same words are spoken naturally, in sequences with others. Why? Because the ways in which Spanish words are orally linked produce fusions or unexpected dislocations of word boundaries. (It happens in English, too, though far less commonly: Did she say new dance or nude ants? Did he say ice cream or I scream?) This constant, universal, and perfectly natural phenomenon of Spanish speech can play tricks on your ear and thus impede your comprehension of what you hear. How to get around this problem? Simple. You need to assimilate into your own Spanish speech habits The Big Secret of what actually happens phonetically when native speakers put words together in sequences. Here it is, friends:

THE BIG SECRET

To use spoken Spanish naturally and correctly, as collections of phrases or sequences of syllables rather than as individual artificially spaced out one after another, think of each whole phrase as one long word, subject to the linking process mentioned above and treated in detail in Section II, below. The basic idea is that in Spanish almost all interior syllables in a word or phrase begin with a consonant and most of them end with a vowel. Just remember this critically important fact: Most of the syllables of the full phrase will begin with a consonant regardless of where its component words begin or end. And as often as not, it sounds as if the boundary between one word and another has shifted or disappeared altogether. If the all-too-brief remarks on pronunciation in most grammar books would simply state that, in practice, Spanish speech is a sequence of syllables that almost always begin with a consonant regardless of where individual words begin or end, thousands upon thousands of Spanish students could be saved a lot of grief when the time comes to actually perform and comprehend the language in its spoken form. This phenomenon of oral Spanish is precisely what every program of Puerta del Sol demonstrates over and over again.

II. Some Practical Applications

The illustrations in this section are designed to help you develop your listening skills. They are anything but passive amusements, however. Obviously, there is a close relationship between listening and speaking; and since active oral communication is, after all, a sophisticated form of organized sound, it is essential that the examples below be performed orally if they are to be fully effective. Just trust us on this. For our present purposes, remember this: Speed of pronunciation is not the object. Just concentrate on clean, crisp enunciation of Spanish sounds as accurately as you can make them and at whatever rate you can manage them smoothly and with confidence, observing closely the instances of linking and elision as you go along.

Iñaki Gabilondo, the host of Puerta del Sol, is one of the most distinguished and most readily identifiable voices in Spanish radio today. Not surprisingly, he is careful about his enunciation. Of course, anyone who conducts six continuous hours of live radio, five days a week, is bound to make some mistakes, and Iñaki is no exception. But on the whole, his Spanish is crisp, clear, a joy to listen to. (Perceptive listeners know that he often speaks just a bit more slowly, or pauses a bit more frequently, for Puerta del Sol listeners than he does when talking at normal speed with his guests.)

Let's take, for example, Iñaki's introduction to the second Puerta del Sol program we published in 1997 (Vol. VIII, No. 2). It offers some excellent examples of the points made above, in Section I, about linking--the frequent shifting and blurring of word boundaries in ordinary Spanish speech--so we'll use phrases taken from this segment for purposes of practical illustration.

Basically, four kinds of junctions are possible in any pair of printed words. (For simplicity's sake, we'll leave their technical descriptions out of this discussion, and we will not try to cover bizarre phonetic oddities or special cases.) We'll use bold letters and symbols to mark them in the examples below. The first two sets of examples involve a natural, automatic "stop," or occlusion, marked here with a double-divider (||), and thus pose little or no phonetic problem for the native speaker of English. The tricky stuff is illustrated in categories 3 and 4, where the crucial word boundaries, initially marked below with a plus-sign (+), seem to become dislocated or disappear altogether in actual speech. Of course, most of the phrases in these last two categories still have one or more natural phonetic occlusions, but some of these ignore word boundaries, showing up where you would not expect to find them just by looking at the arrangement of the words in their printed form.