7 Tips to Improve your Spanish Pronunciation as an English Speaker

Accents are beautiful and they're normal. So, if you have an English accent when you're speaking Spanish but people understand you and you understand people when they speak, then it's fine. But if you want to improve your Spanish pronunciation and reduce your English accent, then this video is for you. I'll give you seven easy tips to put in your Spanish toolbox. Hola a todos. Welcome back. If you're new, I'm really glad to see you here. I invite you to subscribe. I post a new lesson every week, so you can click that bell for the notifications. Languages are patterns and we humans are made for patterns. We love patterns. The way our brain develops is very much based on patterns. There's this cool phenomenon that toddlers do when they're growing up and learning new words, learning a language, which is called overextension. Imagine a little toddler going outside and looking at the sky and dad pointing at the moon and saying, look, moon. And then the toddler goes inside back into the house and sees the light bulb and they go, moon. And then they see a white ball and they say, moon. They create patterns in order to learn new words, to learn language. And accents are made of patterns too. There are characteristic sounds that are spread throughout the different languages and the different dialects. For example, in English, when you see an O, you say O. And we in Spanish say O. It's slightly different. But every time that we see an O, we say O. And every time that English speakers see an O, they say O. These are sound patterns unique to each language. So today we're going to see seven pronunciation patterns of English that are often carried over into Spanish or overextended by English speakers when they speak Spanish. And we'll learn how to replace them with the Spanish equivalent. So basically, I'm going to give you seven tips, seven things to remember to put into your Spanish toolbox. Let's go. Tip number one, keep your vowels crisp. In English, when a word has two or more consecutive syllables ending in a vowel, usually A or E, A or E, we tend to drop one of them or English speakers tend to drop one of them. Usually around, so before or after the stressed syllable. How does that look? Take the example of the word banana. If you've seen my previous videos on pronunciation, you might be familiar with this. The stressed syllable on this word is the middle one. It's na or ne. So what we do with this word in English is dropping the two vowels that are around this center syllable. So it sounds buh, ne, nuh, uh, uh. This sound that I'm doing here, uh, is called the schwa. And it's the most neutral vowel because your tongue is completely still. It's not doing anything. If you relax your tongue and your mouth and everything, that's the sound that English speakers tend to make when they have this pattern. So in the word banana, we in Spanish would say, ah, ah, ah. And in English, uh, eh, uh, uh, uh, banana. Other words with this, for example, basicamente. We have a, i, a, e, e. So we have all our vowels crisp. And in English, you'd say basicamente. Okay, so you'd be dropping a couple there. If you want to see more examples on this specific pattern, check my other video. I'll leave it in the description below about the most mispronounced words. So tip number one, keep your vowels sharp. So this one is a, e, i, o, u. And every time that you see them, they're going to be pronounced exactly as I've just did. Always. Tip number two, do not skip vowels. Yeah, this is almost the same as the one before, but vowels in Spanish are so important. I cannot stress this enough. The English pattern here would be that every time that you have words with e, r or o, r, you often reduce or almost not say this e in the e, r or the o, r. For example, look at the word operate. It's not opairate, it's operate, right? Let me know if I'm not saying it right. Then you have the word doctor, doctor, tur. You're not saying tor, you're not saying doctor, you're saying doctor. And you're kind of, that vowel, you're kind of not saying it or sounding a little bit like a schwa, like a uh, tur, uh, tur, okay? In the word operate, it's like you're going from the p to the r without the e. And in the word doctor, you're going from the t to the r, tur, without the o, o. So in Spanish, operate, it's operar, so per, operar. In the word doctor, we would say doctor, so the o is there, doctor. So basically, tip one and tip two, always say your vowels, always. Tip number three, make your t's and d's dental. What do I mean by that? So in American English, what happens with the t's and d's is that when you have, when you're saying it fast, it sounds like a tap, like a quick flap, like ra. And you say like water, ladder, better, and so on. And this pattern often gets overextended into Spanish and words like todo sound toro or words like cada sound cara. And the problem with this is that it changes the meaning. So instead of cada, each, you're saying cara, face. Or instead of todo, everything, you're saying toro, bull, bull. So remember, da, da, they're always dental, always touch, da, da, da, da. No da, da, da, da, da, but da, da, da. Or in the case of the d, if it's after a vowel, da, da, da, it's a bit softer. I have many videos on this. So tip three, da, da, t and d dental, da, da, da, da, da, da. Tip number four, cut the e or the i. The English pattern is usually that. When you have words ending in e, usually these words are borrowed by French, like fiancé or café. They're often ended with a diphthong. What is that? That is like one sound that becomes two. So for the e, you have a, and you have some sort of a e at the end, a. And you say fiancé and café, okay? In Spanish though, we cut them short. They almost end in like a glottal stop, like a, e, okay? So when you have words ending in e, cut them short. Don't let them flow into that e, e, but e. For example, verde is not verde, it's verde, e. Then we have café, café, e, café, not café, but café. So our vowels are not as flowy and beautiful in this case. They're more like e, robotic. Cut them. Now tip number five, very similar to tip number four, cut your o, your o. The pattern in English is that words ending in o, in an o, you make this diphthong into an u, like o, o. I'm not making it perfect in English. So if you think of the word mango, o, you end in o, and we say o. So this pattern of ending o's into o, into this kind of flowy diphthong, it's carried over into Spanish and words that end in o often sound like o, like mango, taco, piano, piano, o, o, not piano, but piano, o, solo, o, solo, o, not solo, but solo, o, o, okay? It's almost like you're pausing the audio there and you're not letting me finish. So it's not like mango, it's like mango, not so open, it's a bit closed, mango. So tips number four and five are e, e, e, o, o, o, okay? Practice doing this, it's really helpful. Tip number six, remember the L. The English pattern when words end in L is to almost not say this L or make what linguists call a dark L. Which is that in words like soul, soul, soul, you do like o at the end and you barely touch anything, you barely touch your tongue with your o, you go like soul, soul, or animal, o, o, there's no touching. So you have the word, for example, school, school. I struggle with these words because of this pattern. So like soul, animal, o, o, this gets overextended into Spanish and then words that end in L are often also mispronounced. And for example, instead of saying soul as its son, I hear soul, soul. Or instead of saying el as in him or he, I hear el, el. Every time that you hear or that you have a word with ending L, L, it's el, el, sol, sol, el, okay? Do your Ls. And last tip, tip number seven, your filler words. You know when we're talking and we're thinking, we don't really know what we're going to say next. So we go like um, um, yeah, so um, uh, this sound. Actually here, you're doing the schwa, which is the sound that I was saying before, which is this really neutral sound, uh, uh, okay? When English speakers are speaking Spanish, it's really common that they say uh, uh, as well. So they say, sí, me llamo Nuria, uh, okay? And you do this uh sound, which sounds English. Instead, do eh, eh, me llamo Nuria, eh, eh. So change it for an eh, eh, it's way more natural in Spanish. For example, me llamo Nuria, eh, soy de Ibiza, eh, tengo el mar, adelante, eh, okay? Now, what do you do with all this information? Practice. And what's the best way to practice pronunciation? The key is to hear a lot of real life speech and spot all these patterns and practice them over and over and over. And for that, I want to recommend an app called FluentU, who are kindly sponsoring this video and also gave me a discount for you guys. With FluentU, you can immerse yourself in authentic Spanish content, like movies, clips, music, videos, and news segments, all with subtitles. So here's what I would do. Choose any video of your interest. You can filter it to your level. And whenever you see these words that end in a or in o or in l, or words that have a lot of vowels, pause and repeat the word over and over so you get used to it. Then continue with the video until the next one. Or you can look up this word with the app instantly and you can follow the links to other videos that are using this word so you can hear it from different people. I personally do this every time that I have a new word that I know that I'm mispronouncing, like category or ambiguous. I've been listening to it over and over. And then I recommend that once you master a word, you put it into context and make like a compound. And with FluentU's integrated review method, you can start with one word and master it and then build up to complete sentences and then practice the sentences over and over. You can install their Chrome extension and then learn while you're watching Netflix or YouTube videos with subtitles. It's perfect for going on a treasure hunt for new words, spotting them in real life speech, and then hearing how native speakers pronounce them. And you can use FluentU on the web, iOS, Android, so you're always learning wherever you go. And remember that you can use my discount link. It's on the description. All right. So those were the seven tips or the seven patterns of this video. Let me know in the comments if you found them useful, if you have any questions on anything that I've just said. Now practice, listen over and over, and I'll see you on the next video. Ciao.