The Spanish Pronunciation Guide:

Vowel + Vowel

VOWEL + VOWEL (is heard as an elision of the two, with no "stop" in between:) VOWELVOWEL >||.

When the two vowels at the word-juncture are identical, you hear only one, perhaps slightly elongated; that is, just VOWEL >||.

EXAMPLES:

Note the "type 3" juncture (consonant+vowel) present in each of the previous three examples: in "en+este," in "es+el," and in "al+espacio."

The first "type 4" elision in this phrase produces a pseudo-triphthong (see below). It's a stretch, phonetically, because all three eliding vowels are strong vowels, but the triphthong is there, easier to hear the more rapid a given individual's rate of speech.

Iñaki's pause between que and hoy necessarily breaks the triphthong we would expect to hear here.

In virtually all cases of "vowel+vowel" junctures, what you see is not what you hear: the strictly visual input of printed characters and spaces scarcely tallies at all with the sounds your ears perceive, because in speech the ending vowel of one word elides right into the beginning vowel of the next word, and the artificial printed boundary between them disappears altogether. What's more, one whole syllable seems to have dropped out at each such juncture; indeed it has, phonetically speaking. And the following syllable, in every case, begins with a consonant. (You can quickly verify that after every double divider (||) in all the categories above, the next syllable begins with a consonant.) If the two vowels at this type of juncture are different, a "pseudo-diphthong" is spontaneously created (i.e., a combination of two vowels, both of which are clearly heard but which form just one syllable, or one single upward- or downward-gliding "beat," even if they are both strong vowels); the same mechanism often produces a "pseudo-triphthong"--and it happens that there are two of them above, in our test-lab segment: "seaes" and "queoi." The important point is that although "seaes," like "queoi," contains three audible vowels, each cluster of vowels constitutes only one syllable, just one "beat." If the two vowels at the juncture are identical (as in several examples above), you normally hear just one of them, subtly elongated perhaps, but only one. There may even be three identical vowels at a given fused juncture: Ella cree en mí (technically, six syllables) would probably be heard as E / lla / cre(e)(e)n / mí, with a slightly elongated vowel at the end of the third syllable; but in typically rapid speech, all that would survive, phonetically, would be the four-syllable phrase, E / lla / cren / mí. Similarly, Él va a acabar (6 syllables, as written) will sound more like Él / va / ca / bar.

So, what's the point of all this phonetic dissection? The point, as we remarked in Section I, is that the more you know about how spoken Spanish actually sounds, about how it's performed and under what conditions, the more readily you'll be able to comprehend and imitate it consistently and with increasing confidence. In short, the more complete your comprehension of spoken Spanish will be, and the more authentic your own performance in the language. In immediate practical terms, the harder you strive to execute good Spanish pronunciation in the prelistening segments of the Study Supplement that is custom tailored for each issue of Puerta del Sol, the more successfully you'll manage the alternating listening segments, and the happier you'll be with the overall results of your combined efforts.

These are no small promises. But if you practice diligently the operations we've described here--we mean really work with them, until they become virtually automatic habits--the improvement in the overall quality of your Spanish speech and understanding will be no small achievement, either.