How To Sound More NATURAL When Speaking Spanish!

Hey, it's Rocky here from SpeakSpanishFaster.com and in today's video I want to be sharing with you a key to sounding more natural or authentic when you speak Spanish. Now before we get into that really quick I want to share some big news with you guys because I consider you as my extended family. Last week, this time last week, so I'm filming this on a Friday, this time last week my wife gave birth to our very first child. It was a girl so or it is a girl so that's one reason I haven't been as active just dealing with you know a new baby which has been an amazing experience but it's also very difficult to film videos when the baby's crying all the time so it's been quite the transition and trying to balance work and dealing with the newborn. So I will try to be as active as possible over the next few weeks but please forgive me if I am not. But there's one thing I will say is a lot of times just sitting there holding the baby you have all types of ideas like my brain is just constantly working 24-7 so I had a good idea for today's video that I wanted to share with you because it's really going to help you improve the way you sound when you speak Spanish. So where to begin? About six months maybe even a year ago I actually hired an accent coach. Alright it cost me over a thousand dollars for three sessions three one-hour sessions with this guy. He's a Hollywood accent coach so pretty much what he does is he works with actors that need help with an accent. So for example like you know the movie Wolf of Wall Street right? Margot Robbie she's even though she's Australian in that movie she has like a perfect Brooklyn accent. There's a lot of actors that may be English or Australian that have perfect American accents and they're not just born with this they're not just born with the skill they have to practice to get better at it to master it and they hire guys like the guy that I hired to help me. Now I didn't necessarily need him to help me with a specific accent I really just wanted to pick his brain because he's a master at that and at the end of the day I'm just a student like you I'm constantly trying to improve myself especially when it comes to learning languages because I love learning languages and sounding more natural when I speak those languages as you guys know like that's my main key thing of we don't just learn Spanish to want to learn it we learn Spanish to actually just embody the whole identity of being a Spanish speaker and I talked about this recently in one of my videos uh the Spanish chameleon paradox idea which is basically our main goal isn't just to become fluent in Spanish but it's to sound be so fluent and sound so good that we don't come off as not being native like natives think that we grew up speaking the language we're that good so we blend in but at the same time we stand out because if you're a native you know English speaking person and you speak Spanish that well you're going to stand out so that's the paradox that's the goal and the only way to achieve that goal is not only to be able to speak Spanish fluently and be able to communicate is to sound more natural when you speak so that's why you know you contact the accent guy who is a master in helping people sound a certain way when they speak so what is like an accent I think first we have to talk about accent and dialect like is there a difference between the two a lot of people just put those into the same category accent is intonation pretty much the flow the way you sound all right dialect is more the words that you use the word selection that you use and then of course we have pronunciation so you take these three things where a lot of people put dialect and accent into the same bucket but if you take those buckets put them together you have the sound it's best it's easiest if we first think about English so you and I we both speak English but we sound way different but we're both fluent so what is the difference well my flow and intonation might be a little different than yours and my dialect the actual words that I use probably different than yours based on and all this is because we grew up in different places we grew up with different people we consume different pieces of content so that's and we pronounce words differently so we could say read you and I can read the same paragraph but we're going to sound different because of these characteristics so that's the sound and the thing is when people are learning Spanish they get so wrapped up in grammar conjugation all that stuff memorizing words that they forget about the sound which is the most important when it comes to sounding natural because even as a native English speaker I may pronounce words wrong I may use words wrong there may be words I don't even know what they mean but because of my flow you know I'm an I'm a native English speaker because of the way I sound because of my flow because of my intonation because all that right so you're never going to be able to sound natural if you don't focus on what actually leads to sounding natural right so this is not something that you you can just easily pick up you you have to train it especially as an adult learning a language now the benefit of being an adult learning Spanish is that you can be aware of these things and you can focus on them that's the advantage that we have over kids is that we already have learned our native language we've learned that languages have nuance I'm teaching you right now of the different nuances just within the language itself challenging the way that you would even approach listening to your own language that right there is going to give you a big leg up on sounding more natural when you speak now with our native language of course we are always immersed in it so it's easy we kind of pick up our dialect accent and all that pronunciation without even paying attention to it but when we're not fully immersed in it living in a foreign country we have to immerse ourselves with the content that we consume and the only way to do that is you know through videos courses whatever podcasts whatever way you do it but not only that is by the way you can get an advantage is by being aware of what you're actually trying to do I always say like you can't well I don't always say this but people have said right you can't get to where you want to get to if you don't know where you're going or you don't know what your destination is so when you understand that your goal is to sound natural well that really changes the way that you approach learning Spanish right because you're no longer going to do the things that aren't going to get you to that level and I've spoken with hundreds of students personally over the years and I've worked with thousands of students and the main thing that stands out is that the people that really that watch my channel and really want to learn Spanish aren't just people that want to learn a few words here and there like they really want to master Spanish like I did and that changes the way that you approach the language so right now we kind of have the groundwork right you have accent dialect pronunciation those things determine the way you sound when you speak Spanish now a lot of people will say well I can't sound like another person I would say you probably have already sounded like another person like has there ever been a movie that you try to imitate like me and my friends we always try to at least when I was growing up we try to mimic all different types of people like WWE wrestlers Scarface like different people we try to imitate just because it was cool and without even knowing it what we were actually doing was okay how can we copy their accent their dialect and their pronunciation so that we could sound just like them it's possible we can all do it so I really challenge you even just to try it in English before you even try it in Spanish all right anybody can do this so one of the biggest tips I got from my accent coach was to exaggerate the accent that you want to learn because when you exaggerate it you get a feel for the flow the intonation and then you dial it back when it comes time to speak it so for example Puerto Rican accent right accent I'm very familiar with my family's from Puerto Rico I pretty much do this when I'm making fun of my cousin Kevin like he used to make fun of me all the time sometimes you got to give it back to him so like if I'm if I'm imitating Kevin right now and I'm exaggerating his Puerto Rican accent right he'd be on the phone I remember when we were younger right he'd be on the phone with a girl he'd be like so that would be Kevin right he would and I'm not even really that's how he would pretty much talk but you see the intonation the the Puerto Rican flow right now if I play that again I don't know exactly everything I said but I say so it's like it's not as exaggerated but it's still Puerto Rican accent so when you practice this you fully understand now when you listen to the Spanish and you get the accent then you really want to exaggerate it by doing this and doing this and doing this you're going to train yourself to build that flow inside of my Spanish on demand membership which I don't know you might be a part of or not you can just go to our website check it out it's only $9.95 a month you can cancel at any time but pretty much in this membership what I do is I break down different accents like we listen to audio I'll break it down because a lot of times it really helps people to understand what's actually being said because you can read something and hear it and you still just can't hear what they're saying because like in Puerto Rican Spanish right they're cutting the s's all the time they're using the l's now I don't only do Puerto Rican Spanish inside the membership I do all different types of dialects and accents just to help people get familiar with any type of Spanish because people want to learn all different types of accents that are in my course some want to learn Puerto Rican Spanish some want to learn Mexican some want to learn Spain some want to learn Colombian so I do my best to help with all the accents but right now we have our most popular series that I started and it's actually a series on Bad Bunny so I think we've done three parts so far where I'm breaking down the exact way Bad Bunny talks and even studying it for myself it's helping me see nuances in Puerto Rican Spanish and it's really helping our students that's why they keep asking me for more episodes and all I'm doing there is going through the accent the dialect the one thing that I noticed like for example Bad Bunny so in English right when we're thinking we say um but in Puerto Rico they say at the so Bad Bunny if you watch his interviews he's always saying when he's thinking and say something like that right like that is part of the dialect it's sort of the way that you know he expresses his self of thinking just by using this and adding it to your Spanish you could sound more natural simply by doing that so instead of speaking Spanish and saying um um you know I'm saying you would say like you use that to think that's just one simple simple example but we've inside Spanish on Demand I'm doing that and the students love it because it trains you to hear Spanish a certain way and I always say that whenever I show people how to do this and how to do some of the more advanced things with intonation pattern recognition and phonetic analysis and things like that when you start diving deep into the sounds of Spanish you can't unsee it like you can't unhear it you never hear Spanish the same again and this doesn't just help you with the way that you sound it helps you with the way you understand because now you hear Spanish better which makes it easier to understand which makes it easier for you to speak and respond because you don't have to think so much about what's being said so it really helps your comprehensible input because in the beginning you'll have to really do this actively trying to figure out the different sounds and all that but once you do it for a few days it starts to become natural and then when you start listening to a lot of Spanish your brain naturally just identifies and does the magic and over time you get better and better so the idea isn't to do this active stuff to the end of time it's to do it hardcore for a few weeks to really change the way your mind hear Spanish the way your brain interprets Spanish and then incorporate that into you know whenever you're just consuming input and that's the key to sounding more natural when you speak so again to sum this up what can you take away here what can you do number one next time you're listening to a podcast next time you're watching a YouTube video in Spanish whatever or you're even doing a lesson from one of my courses number one listen to the flow or the accent number two pay attention to the dialect what are the words being used like in Spain they use vosotros in Puerto Rico and any Spanish on this side of the world we don't use vosotros all right but but what do we use what is the dialect um what are the like if you're studying Puerto Rican Spanish for example what are the Puerto Rican words and I've done videos on Puerto Rican words um what are the words being used what it how is the pronunciation how do they pronounce the r's how do they pronounce the do they pronounce the s's do they say the s you know there's a lot of different things that are important for you to pay attention just spend the next few days just focusing on that take notes this works really well when you can print a transcript like go on YouTube find the subtitle copy paste them onto the document print that or podcast that's another thing podcasts now have transcripts on them I think I showed you guys this you can use that write down some characteristics you notice start keeping notes keeping tabs of all the characteristics you notice you can also go on Wikipedia and just search Mexican Spanish characteristics Puerto Rican Spanish characteristics right there you'll find like common characteristics that you already know to be on the lookout for there's just so many things you can do that a lot of people don't even realize that that you can do so instead of wasting your time with not to take shots at any app or anything but instead of wasting your time with apps and all that crap do this like this is you don't even got to pay for the app just do that and you will drastically improve all right so of course I have tons of other secrets that can really help you but I think this is really going to help you um but if you want to learn more tips and tricks that can really help you become fluent in Spanish definitely check out my three secrets to learn Spanish faster I'll put the link in the comments down below check out Spanish on Demand too just go to SpeakSpanishFaster.com and go to my courses you can check out Spanish on Demand there as well like I said it's just $9.95 a month I mean you can cancel at any time so if you don't like it just cancel um and I'm pretty much uploading episodes to that every single week so yeah I think you'll enjoy them a lot of pretty much all our students do um so if you like this video be sure to hit the thumbs up for me comment below let me know what else you need help with last but not least please do not forget to subscribe to the channel turn on notifications so you never miss another video