Spanish Phonetics (Chapter 1)

The section on “Knowledge of the Sound System” was most interesting to me because it talked about how English-speakers pronounce foreign words. My undergraduate background is in Spanish. I am not fluent in it, but am able to hold a conversation and have taken Spanish classes on translation, literature, and phonetics.

Phonetics was honestly one of the hardest courses I ever took, but I loved it because it taught me how to correctly pronounce words in Spanish like a real native speaker. When I first started taking Spanish courses, I didn’t really have trouble pronouncing the words. The rules for Spanish pronunciation are pretty simple and don’t really change. But, I still sounded too “American” and could not really master a perfect Latino/Hispanic accent (even though there is still technically no such thing as a Latino/Hispanic accent because of all the different countries and dialects within them). It wasn’t until I took the Spanish phonetics course that I was really given a breakdown on how to properly pronounce words. Professors always talk about rolling r-r-r-r or that two lls are pronounced like a y. But the phonetics class went into way more detail, explaining things like changing an n to an m if it comes before the letter b or connecting the consonant from the end of a word to the next word in your sentence if it begins with a vowel. These rules played a huge role in helping me improve my accent.

Having learned the language so late in life, I think my mind had already been programmed to be an English-speaker. When I began learning Spanish, it was almost like having to create a whole new section for this language in my brain. I had to start from scratch and learn all new pronunciations, nouns and verbs, phrases, and other aspects of language for Spanish now. I feel like people have a tendency to think that English is a superior language and that everyone should know how to speak it (and those who don’t speak it are lower-class or uneducated). This is not true. One thing we were always taught in Spanish is that it is not English translated, meaning the grammar and translations do not align perfectly in English. There might be some cognates, but Spanish is its own language and is unrelated to English. In fact, there are people in Spanish-speaking countries and all around the world that don’t even know that the English language exists.