Vowels vs. consonants

[Glen]

What do you all think, is it a good suggestion to recommend that English learners of Spanish concentrate more on getting the vowel sounds right, than the consonants? Lately I've been working on trying to make pure-sounding vowels, not the careless ones a native English-speaker uses, and people seem to respond better even when I mangle the consonants.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

Consonant sounds usually don't interfere with our comprehension of what a foreigner is saying in Spanish (not even with a foreign "r"), but "impure" vowel sounds do.

When a person has spelling mistakes, for example writing "carretero" instead of "carretera", or "ame" instead of "ama", it's normally because they pronounce vowels as they do in English, so the right word doesn't come to them immediately. The meaning of the word changes with a single vowel, which makes it more difficult to understand the foreigner.

When the vowels are pronounced like in English, they may become dyphthongs in Spanish ("ei", "ai", "iu"), so the words can actually lose any meaning; the same happens when schwa sound gets in the way, because we only hear grumbling.

[Hiperbólico]

Having taken the fifth year of a Spanish learning sequence with other students, I've had the chance to hear native English speakers (of somewhat advanced level in Spanish) speak the language. It definitely seems like most have a better grip on the consonants compared to vowels.

I think this is because most native English speakers already know almost all the consonant sounds in Spanish before ever starting (or at least close approximations), because those sounds are already found in English. The challenge then becomes how to correspond those sounds to the Spanish spelling, which is much different than English. For example, "y" (yes) → ñ, ll, certain diphthongs. And also "h" (hot) → j (ignoring non-trivialities like yeísmo). After years of exposure to the language, this correspondence comes much more easily for the native English speakers. And sure, their consonant pronunciation isn't reflective of any native dialect, but more-often-than-not it is perfectly understandable.

Many however still struggle with correct pronunciation of vowels, because IMO the Spanish vowel sounds are (overall) more foreign to the English tongue, and in several cases more crucial to a word's meaning. So yes, hammer in those vowel sounds! And don't get me started on intonation.

[aleCcowaN]

I'd rather say Spanish has roughly five vowels (hint: check the alphabet /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/) while English has roughly twelve (/a:/ /ӕ/ /ʌ/ /ɒ/ /ɔ:/ /e/ /ɜ:/ /ә/ /i:/ /ɪ/ /u:/ /ʊ/). So I reckon English speakers pretty much know all Spanish vowels. The problem is the syllabic rhythm in Spanish vs. the stressed-syllable based rhythm in English: in Spanish, vowels in stressed and unstressed syllables are pronounced in a very similar fashion with a pretty constant rhythm. In English, vowels in unstressed syllables are mostly changed into /ә/ /ɪ/ and /ʊ/

Compare "The capital of Canada is Ottawa" with "La capital de Canadá es Ottawa", mainly /'kӕpɪtәl/ with /kapi'tal/ and /ˈkænədə/ with /kana'da/. In my experience there's a lot of problems with English speakers trying to acquire the right pronunciation. Two extremes of the problems are beginners using compound vowels like /oʊ/ or /әʊ/ instead of single ones like /o/ or intermediate students becoming extremely monotonous as if every single syllable in Spanish is stressed.

The key problem -with a huge easier said than done in it- is making the student to understand that a full vowel in Spanish is not a stressed vowel in English, meaning that /'kiero/ is not pronounced the English way /'kierә/ neither the English way /'kieroʊ/, that sometimes is corrected by toning it down the English way /'kierәʊ/. You got a lot of examples of half cooked Spanish accents in TV programs and movies with Hispanic types speaking what is supposed to be native Spanish. Some 95% of the instances fall in this category -to my astonishment-. I think that during all the seasons of Southland I never heard anyone pronouncing "ese" in Spanish -most of the times /'esә/, sometimes /'ɜ:sә/, a few times /'ɜ:se/ and ocasionally /'e'se/, but never /'ese/ in Spanish -though I reckon it is Californian jargon and not supposed to be really in Spanish-.