Lesson 1: Spanish Pronunciation & Basic Translation

Hey, everybody. Kiru Paul here. Welcome to the first lesson of my course, Cero to Conversational. This course was designed specifically for English-speaking adults who speak little or no Spanish or those who have tried and failed to learn Spanish in the past via more traditional courses. Even if you're an absolute beginner to Spanish, I promise you that by the end of this lesson, you're going to be translating sentences on your own. I know that's a big promise, but you're going to see. In this lesson, the very first lesson, I'm going to be giving you an overview of the Spanish language, teaching you a couple of cool cognate tricks to convert your English vocabulary into Spanish without having to rely on memorization, and most importantly, teaching you Spanish pronunciation. After all, the goal of the entire course is to make you conversational in Spanish, and that isn't going to happen if you're just watching these videos silently. To get the most out of this video lesson, you're going to have to be pronouncing these things, these sentences out loud. So I suggest that you tell the people in your house up front that you're going to be doing this so they don't keep popping their heads in and asking, did you say something and what are you even doing in here? As an English speaker, you already have a big head start on learning Spanish because the two languages share some common roots, especially when it comes to vocabulary. Take a look at these English words, animal, legal, social, criminal, digital, final, formal, individual, normal, hospital, and judicial. As you can see, these words all share a common trait. They all end with AL. Now, I'm going to do a quick little trick here and turn them all into Spanish words. Ready? There you go. No, there wasn't a glitch there. They just didn't change. All of these words are Spanish words. You just may not have recognized them because, well, they're pronounced differently. These are known as cognates, which are words in two languages that share similar roots. Now, sometimes these words are going to be exactly the same as they are here, and sometimes they're just going to be very similar. Fortunately for you, English and Spanish share a lot of vocabulary, and the majority of that vocabulary comes from either Latin or Greek. This is going to allow you to gain about a thousand word vocabulary in Spanish just from the English you already know. The cognate technique I just showed you is known as the AL to AL cognate trick, meaning that many words, but not all words in English, that end in AL will be the same in Spanish. As I just mentioned, although these look exactly the same, they do not sound the same. This is how they would sound in Spanish. Animal, legal, social, criminal, digital, final, formal, individual, normal, hospital, judicial. It sounds very different, doesn't it? So, you're going to have to learn Spanish pronunciation. Well, compared to English, Spanish pronunciation is much easier to learn as a second language because Spanish is a phonetic language, meaning if you can see it, you can say it. It follows very clear pronunciation rules. The same cannot be said about English. Like think of herd and beard. Why are they not pronounced the same? Or one and bone. And then we even have words that have different pronunciations and are written exactly the same. Like live and live. That doesn't make any sense. Refuse, refuse. I mean, there just seems to be no rhyme or reason to English. The key to pronouncing Spanish correctly is to really focus on the sound of the vowels. Fortunately, this is going to be super easy because there are only five vowel sounds in Spanish. Now, English has 12 vowel sounds, in case you were wondering, but Spanish only has five. Here they are. Say them along with me. A sounds like ah. E sounds like eh. I sounds like ee, a real hard ee. O sounds like oh. And you sounds like ooh. Okay, let's take a look at that word list again, those words ending in AL, because I want you to practice your pronunciation. Remember, you're not going to become conversational or get good at Spanish by just watching these videos silently. So, we're going to go through each one. I really want you to focus on the vowel sounds, okay? I'm going to say it twice. I'm going to pause so you can say it twice. If you had some difficulty pronouncing those, don't worry. It's going to take some practice. Now, I want to talk a little bit more about Spanish pronunciation. I'm going to use these words. So, let's talk about the letter C. C normally has a hard C sound, like a kuh. Except before the letters E or I. In that case, it'll have an S sound. Take a look at this. Criminal. Hard K, right? Criminal. Social. The C has an S sound because it is before an I or an E. It's an I in this case. Let's talk about G. G normally in Spanish has a hard G sound or a guh, but it will have an H sound, like an H in English, before an E or an I. Here are two examples. Legal. That's a hard G. And then we have digital. Digital. Which is more like the English H. A V in Spanish has kind of a soft B sound, like boy or Ben. Individual. And one letter in Spanish has absolutely no sound, and that is the H. You may have noticed that I didn't say hospital. I said hospital. A J in Spanish sounds like an H in English, and we had an example of that in judicial. Judicial. Okay, that AL to AL cognate trick is pretty cool, right? But it isn't the most useful cognate trick in my humble opinion. I'm going to teach you the big one so you can practice it as we continue to work through your Spanish pronunciation. All right, here it is. The TION to CION cognate trick. So to use this one, we're going to take words in English that end in TION. Now the first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at these words and we're going to change the T at the end to a C and then put an accent over the last O. That accent is going to tell us to put the emphasis on that letter when we pronounce the word. Well, there you go. These are Spanish words now. It's that easy. We're going to go through these, and just like I did before, I'm going to say each one twice. Pause. So you have an opportunity to say the word. Ready? CREACIÓN. INVITACIÓN. DOCUMENTACIÓN. INFORMACIÓN. VERIFICACIÓN. You can slow these down at first until you get better. You can say CREACIÓN. INVITACIÓN. Now, changing your English into the Spanish using this cognate trick was pretty easy, right? Now, as with most cognate tricks, it doesn't work on all words. For example, the word TRANSLATION in English is not TRANSLACIÓN in Spanish. It's TRADUCCIÓN. Nevertheless, this cognate trick works often enough that you can really feel confident making educated guesses trying to use it and working into your Spanish. In those cases where you're wrong, what generally happens is the person you're talking to, it's So, let's see if you can do a few of these cognate tricks on your own. I want you to convert these four English words into Spanish. DECORATION. ELEVATION. CONTINUATION. CONFIRMATION. Now, you can pause the video at any point if you want to work on something a little bit longer. I encourage you to write these out on a piece of paper. It just helps to reinforce that, you know, you're seeing it, you're writing it, and you're going to be saying it. All right. Are you ready? If you're not ready, you may want to pause. Otherwise, we're going to move on. All right. What do we end up with? DECORATION. We change the T to C, we put an accent over the last O, and we get DECORACIÓN. DECORACIÓN. ELEVATION. We change the T to C, put an accent over the O, ELEVACIÓN. ELEVACIÓN. Are you saying these along with me? Because you should be saying them along with me. CONTINUATION. Change the T to C, accent over the O, CONTINUACIÓN. CONTINUACIÓN. That can be a little trickier, that one, because you have a lot of vowels in there, and you're going to be pronouncing all of the vowels. And CONFIRMATION. T to C, accent over the O, CONFIRMACIÓN. CONFIRMACIÓN. All right. Now, let's cover some of the cognate tricks that are going to change a little in the root. So, if we have an English word beginning with an S followed by a consonant, then it's going to be, the S is going to turn into ES in the stem. Here's an example. SPECULATION. See, we have an S followed by a consonant, that's the P. So, the Spanish is going to be ESPECULACIÓN. ESPECULACIÓN. STATION. Same thing. We're going to be adding an E on the front. Everything else is going to go the same way. We change the T to C, we put an accent over it. ESTACIÓN. And ESTACIÓN in Spanish can mean STATION or it can mean SEASON, like the seasons. You know, fall, spring, summer, stuff like that. Don't worry if you can't remember some of these nuances with the cognate trick. The first time you watch this video, you can refer back to this video whenever you feel the need. And for some folks, you may want to watch it several times to really drive these things home. All right. Here's another one. Double letters in English that don't change the sound of the word will often go to a single letter in Spanish. They just don't like wasted letters. Okay? So, take a look at this one in English. RECOMMENDATION. Look, we have those two M's together in the middle. They're not changing the sound. It just still has an M sound. It doesn't even have a long M sound. We're not saying RECOMMENDATION. I don't know why we have two letters in English. Anyways, in Spanish, we won't. It'll change to one. And repeat after me. I'm going to say it twice. RECOMMENDACION. COMMUNICATION. Two M's stuck together. I don't know why. We're going to drop one of them. COMUNICACION. Your turn. I'm guessing you said it right. I can't hear you. Here's another one. ILLUMINATION. Now, a double L in Spanish will have a Y sound. So, if we kept the two L's, it wouldn't sound like ILLUMINATION anymore. It would sound like ILLUMINATION. So, it's going to drop to a single L. ILLUMINACIÓN. It's going to take you some practice to get this cognate trick down. And that's not really the point of this video. The point is so you can work on your Spanish pronunciation. And you can also see that Spanish is not going to be as difficult for you to learn as you may have thought it was. You can use your English to give you a huge boost. And not just in vocabulary. It's also going to help when we get into some of the grammar. You'll see what I mean as we go through the course. Alright, let's get back to our double letters or two of the same letters together in English. Sometimes, we're going to keep that in Spanish if they each have their own individual sound. Meaning, it's important for the pronunciation of the word. A good example of this is COOPERATION. Even in English, we're saying COOPERATION. We're pronouncing each one of those O's. Since it sounded out like that, it's going to stay the same in the root in the Spanish. COOPERACIÓN Now, if there are two R's together in a word, they tend to stay together. Even though they're not pronounced separately. They're actually pronounced like a... Some people say it's like a trill. Like a RRRRR sound. And this is going to be one of the most difficult sounds for most English speakers to make. And it's just going to take some practice. So, we have NARRATION. And we make that into Spanish. Again, T to C. Accent over the O. Those two R's are going to stay together. So, we're still going to focus on our vowels. Right? I'm going to say it twice. And then you can try. NARRACIÓN That rolling R is going to give a lot of people trouble. If you're not getting it right now. Or it's sounding like a... NARRACIÓN Which some people pronounce it that way. You're just going to have to work on it. Some people refer to it like a machine gun sound. Like little kids make. When they're like... Just take your time with that. You're going to get it. So, with the TIO and CIO incognito trick. You may see some other spelling changes in the root of the word. That don't always make as much sense. Here are some of the common ones. You just have to kind of learn them as they come up. DEMONSTRATION Actually becomes DEMOSTRACIÓN DEMOSTRACIÓN And IMMIGRATION With the double M's. Which normally you expect to drop one. They picked up an N. IMMIGRACIÓN And HUMILIATION Actually picked up a double L. You may remember I just mentioned that A double L is going to have a Y sound. So HUMILIATION is going to turn into HUMILACIÓN See it's like a Y sound in there. Here's another spelling change. You're going to see not just here. But occasionally with other cognates. And that is if you have a TH in English. It often turns into just a T. So AUTHORIZACIÓN Would turn into We're going to drop that TH to a T. AUTHORIZACIÓN You try to say it. AUTHORIZACIÓN Good. Good. So how's your pronunciation coming along? Don't worry if it's sounding like AUTHORIZACIÓN It's really going to take some time. Now I want to talk about the N with a squiggly over it. Known as the EÑE Spanish has a regular N with no squiggly. But it also has this N with a squiggly. And it's going to be pronounced like the first N in ONION like that NYE sound. A good example of this is the Spanish word MAÑANA like a NYE We're not done playing with our cognate trick just yet. But I need to touch on the gender of nouns before we proceed. Because I'm giving you an overview of the Spanish language. So, gender of nouns in Spanish. Every noun in Spanish is assigned a gender. It's either masculine or feminine. Even inanimate objects like a chair or a car have gender. But with the exception of living beings the gender assignment seems to be quite random when it comes to inanimate objects and you're just going to have to learn the gender as you learn each new Spanish word. So, with masculine nouns masculine nouns often end with an O but not always. Here's a few examples. CHICO, BOY. HOMBRE, MAN. Remember H is silent. PARQUE, PARK. Now, I want to point out that QU in there in PARQUE that's going to have like a K sound. PARQUE, PARQUE. And EDIFICIO, BUILDING. These are all masculine nouns. With feminine nouns in Spanish they often end with the letter A but not always. Here's some examples. CHICA means GIRL. MUJER means WOMAN. CASA, HOUSE. SILLA, CHAIR. See the double L's? It has a Y sound. SILLA, SILLA. In English our nouns do not have any gender and we use definite articles and indefinite articles before them and don't let the English grammatical terms freak you out because that's where adult learners are like, ah, I don't even know what he means by definite article, indefinite article. Definite article is THE. The word THE. Indefinite article is like A or AN depending on it. Well, in English it's pretty easy because we don't have a lot of options. But in Spanish the definite and indefinite articles have to agree in number and gender with the noun. So let's look at masculine nouns first. The word THE for singular is EL. So EL If I want to say A BOY, I use A BOY. To make nouns plural, if they end with a vowel, we can just add an S so it could be CHICOS because that's a vowel, we just add an S and the THE part has to change because it's always going to agree in number and gender. This is something that's going to be different from English and it might give you some trouble. So it becomes And there's one more And that would mean like SOME BOYS. Here's a Spanish word that does not end in a vowel. See it has an accent over the first A so that's going to show us to put the emphasis there. It means TREE. So if I wanted to make it THE TREE To make it plural, if it doesn't end in a vowel, we have to add an ES And SOME TREES would be UNOS ARBOLES. Okay, that's how masculine nouns work and we're going to move on to feminine nouns. LA is THE UNA for A or AN LAS for the plural and UNAS for SOME. So we're going to do the same drill we just did with masculine nouns. We're going to say for example, we have CHICA, we're going to say THE GIRL, A GIRL, THE GIRLS, SOME GIRLS. Ready? LA CHICA, THE GIRL UNA CHICA, A GIRL LAS CHICAS, THE GIRLS UNAS CHICAS, SOME GIRLS MUJER, which means WOMAN Again, this is going to end with a consonant so we can't just throw an S on. We have to put an ES Remember that when we get to that part. LA MUJER, THE WOMAN UNA MUJER, A WOMAN LAS MUJERES, THE WOMEN UNAS MUJERES, SOME WOMEN And the last one SILLA Remember, L's together. Two L's mean a Y. SILLA LA SILLA, THE CHAIR UNA SILLA, A CHAIR LAS SILLAS, THE CHAIRS UNAS SILLAS, SOME CHAIRS If that seemed a little difficult at first, don't be discouraged. You're going to be working with nouns every single day as you work through this course. So you're going to learn it just through repetition. In this first lesson, this is really just an introduction for those folks who are just super new to Spanish. So I just wanted to give you that little breakdown. Now let's get back to our TION-CION cognate trick. Here's the cool thing. All of the nouns that we've made are all going to be feminine. Isn't that great? It's great because you don't have to try to memorize, is that one masculine, feminine? They're all feminine. So let's take an English word, DECORATION. Let's make it into Spanish. Do you remember how to do it? Change the T to C, put an accent over the O. DECORACION Now I want you to say THE DECORATION, A DECORATION, THE DECORATIONS, and SOME DECORATIONS. How are we going to do that? Here we go. THE DECORATION LA DECORACION Now you say it. A DECORATION UNA DECORACION THE DECORATIONS LAS DECORACIONES You may have noticed the accent mark disappear in the plural. That's not a typo. It does, but you may have noticed that you still managed to put the emphasis in the correct place, even without the accent mark telling you, right? That's why Spanish didn't need to add it. So go ahead and say that. LAS DECORACIONES And SOME DECORATIONS UNAS DECORACIONES Your turn. Alright, now it's time for you to do a little bit of translation. I want you to translate the following. THE INFORMATION THE CONFIRMATION THE IMPLEMENTATION THE MOTIVATION AND THE CERTIFICATIONS Be careful with that last one. It's in the plural. I honestly don't think you need too much time for this, so we're just going to jump into it. I'm going to say the answer once, and I'm going to pause. During that pause, I want you to repeat the answer so you can work on your Spanish pronunciation. Alright, let's get started. LA INFORMACIÓN LA CONFIRMACIÓN LA IMPLEMENTACIÓN LA MOTIVACIÓN LAS CERTIFICACIONES Did you remember to put LAS on that last one? Remember the THE in Spanish is going to agree in number and gender with the noun. Now as you can see, this is a pretty useful cognate trick, but a lot of people ask me, Paul, why do you like this particular cognate trick so much? And the reason is is that I can use this cognate trick to make verbs. Yes, verbs. And for you folks that haven't been in school in a while, those are action words. And we're going to need some action words to start making our first sentences, or your first sentences, actually. So I'm going to show you how to make these verbs. First of all, let's take the Spanish words that we just created, and we're going to drop those definite articles. That means the LA and LAS, we don't need them. Also, we're going to want them to all be in the singular, which is not a problem for most of them, but that one at the end, certificaciones, is going to become certificación. Alright. Now this is super important. If the noun we created, using the T-I-O-N-C-I-O-N cognate trick, ends in acción, A-C-I-O-N, then we can make it a verb. So take a look at our words on the screen. Coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, they all end in acción, which means we can make them a verb. The way we do this is we drop the acción from the end and we add the letter R. So that's it. These are verbs now. So we end up with informar, to inform, confirmar, to confirm, implementar, to implement, motivar, to motivate, and certificar, to certify. That's not so hard, is it? Now you're going to be able to do this with a lot of your T-I-O-N words and convert them into verbs, but not all of them. If the C-I-O-N word that we've created in Spanish, using our cognate trick, does not end in acción, then you cannot make it a verb, okay? That's just how it goes. So here are some examples. Satisfacción, satisfaction, doesn't end in acción. See, there's two C's in there. We cannot make this a verb. Ficción, fiction, same problem. Acción, action, same problem. So we're just going to have to stick with using these as nouns. A little more overview of Spanish. There are actually three types of verbs in Spanish. There are those that end in AR, ER, and IR. Every verb that we create with this little cognate trick is an AR verb. Those little endings are going to be important when we get into conjugations more. So here are examples of an ER and IR verbs. Comer, which means to eat, that's ending with ER, and vivir, to live, is ending with IR. Those are just examples. I don't expect you to learn those right now. Now it's your turn to actually do some of these on your own, and I'm only going to be giving you the English verb. Like, for example, to participate. Because I want you to get in the habit of thinking of T-I-O-N words. So if I was like, hey, do you know how to say to participate in Spanish? You might be like, no, I've never heard the word. But if you can think of a T-I-O-N word, you're like, well, maybe I do. Participation. I can change that to participación. I know it ends in acción, so I drop the C-I-O-N and add an R. Participar, to participate. I guess I do know it. So this exercise is going to get you in that habit. We're going to go through 15 of these. Our first one is to educate. So what I want you to do is stop the video as necessary, and it helps to write these out, and I want you to first think of the T-I-O-N, right, which would be education, and change it into Spanish, and then change it into the verb, to educate. So when I give you the answers, I'm just going to be giving you the noun and the verb. And of course, after I say them, I would like you to say them out loud so you can work on your pronunciation. Because that's our goal, right? We want to make you conversational in Spanish. Alright. Go ahead and take a stab at that first one. Again, pause the video as necessary because I'm going to go through these relatively quickly. Education. Educación. Educar. To observe. Observación. Observar. To reserve. Reservación. Reservar. To legalize. Legalización. Legalizar. To facilitate. Facilitación. Facilitar. To create. Creación. Crear. To document. Documentación. Documentar. To contemplate. Contemplación. Contemplar. To imitate. Imitación. Imitar. To examine. Examinación. Examinar. To converse. Conversación. Conversar. To memorize. Memorización. Memorizar. To participate. Participación. Participar. To pronounce. Pronunciación. Pronunciar. To transform. Transformación. Transformar. Did you get those right? That's a lot of translation there. But, you know, you've learned a lot today, but how much actual memorization's been involved, right? Not a lot. So, I'm going to be asking you now to learn two new words. The first one is querer, and that means to want. That's in the infinitive, right? The unconjugated form. So, the other word I actually want to teach you is just a conjugation from querer. Now, when you take a traditional Spanish course, they generally give you long lists of conjugations. You're going to learn how to say, like, I want, she wants, you want, we want. We're not going to do any of that right now. We're only going to learn one, and that's I want. And the reason we're doing I is because we're going to make you conversational, and the person who's in every conversation you have is yourself. So, you're going to be saying I a lot. So, repeat after me. Yo quiero. Yo quiero. Means I want. I want. The yo is I, and quiero is want. Now, there's a unique thing about Spanish that a lot of times they're actually going to drop that subject, that pronoun, the I, will disappear, and they'll just use the verb. It doesn't change how we translate it in Spanish. For example, you may just see quiero with no yo, but we still translate it as I want. So, the tendency in Spanish is actually to drop the subject or that pronoun and just keep the verb if the conjugation of the verb makes it clear who we're talking about or the context of the conversation does. So, when it comes to yo quiero, it's very clear from the verb conjugation that we're talking about I, so yo normally does not appear with it, and you're just going to say quiero. Quiero. Now, the qu sounds like a k, and I want you to pronounce every single vowel. Quiero. Alright, just think I want. So, big into constructions, I want you to learn little constructions because they're easier as an English speaker to keep in your head straight, and the one we're going to be using today is quiero plus infinitive. Remember, the infinitive is the unconjugated verb. That means I want to do something. Quiero plus infinitive. Here's an example. I want to participate. This uses one of your cognate tricks, right? You just conjugate it to participate. All we do is quiero, and then we plug in infinitives. When we have a series of verbs, we're only conjugating the very first one. I think of it as the locomotive on a train pulling these other cars, and I can just plug in other verbs without having to conjugate them. This is a way that we can speak Spanish faster down the road. So, quiero participar. I want to participate. Piece of cake, right? I'm actually so confident you can use this formula with your cognate trick to successfully translate sentences that we are going to jump right into the exercise, and you, even the absolute beginners, are going to translate complete sentences in Spanish in your very first lesson. Here's number one. I want to memorize the information. I want to memorize the information. Now, I encourage you to actually stop the video at this point and to write this down. Otherwise, the answer is going to come too quickly for you. Just break it down like I showed you. Use the formula. You ready? I want to memorize the information. Quiero memorizar la información. Quiero memorizar la información. Did you get that one? So, you had the quiero, and where did you get memorize from? You had to think of memorization, right? And then you had to make it into the verb. That's where that came from. Now we're back to the information. That's just a noun using your cognate trick. The the is la, right, because información is a feminine noun. Not too bad, right? Here's number two. I want to participate. I want to participate. Quiero participar. Should have gotten that one because it was actually an example I just gave you. I want to examine the documentation. I want to examine the documentation. Quiero examinar la documentación. Quiero examinar la documentación. You should be practicing your pronunciation as we go through these, alright? Number four. I want to cancel the reservation. I want to cancel the reservation. Quiero cancelar la reservación. Quiero cancelar la reservación. Just a quick note about the translation of reservation. Another common translation is not a cognate trick and it is reserva. And in some countries you won't hear reservación used as much. In Mexico we do say reservación for like when I'm making reservations for restaurants, things like that. So feel comfortable using it and if you happen to be in a Spanish speaking country where you don't hear that as much, you may not be able to rely on that particular cognate trick as much. And you'll just have to plug in reserva, okay? Alright, let's get back to these. I want to organize the information. I want to organize the information. Quiero organizar la información. Quiero organizar la información. I want to celebrate. Quiero celebrar. I want to certify the information. I want to certify the information. Quiero certificar la información. Quiero certificar la información. I want to cooperate. Quiero cooperar. I want to collaborate. Quiero colaborar. I want to confirm the description. Quiero confirmar la descripción. I want to present the information. Quiero presentar la información. I want to prepare the documentation. Quiero preparar la documentación. I want to verify the information. Quiero verificar la información. I want to deliberate. Quiero deliberar. I want to decorate. Quiero decorar. I want to speculate. Quiero declarar. No quiero especular. No quiero decorar la casa. Hasta luego.