Do you have a pronunciation guide on Spanishdict to help English students learn how to say words?

Question

I want my students to write the Spanish words in their spirals and write a pronunciation so that they will remember how to say the word. For example the word "Hola" is pronounced "Oh-lah." I am a visual learner not auditory so these pronunciations help me remember how to say a word. If you have it on the site somewhere I have not found it yet. Where would it be? Thanks so much, Truthseeker

Answer 1

Hi, Truth. Welcome to the forum.

Although we don't have a pronunciation guide as you describe it, we do have a Reference Article on How Spanish Letters Sound. It's very helpful.

• Actually Marianne, Paralee did make one ... - LateToDinner Aug 18, 2010

Answer 2

Write a pronunciation so that they will remember how to say the word? Would it not be MUCH easier to learn how each letter sound, and then just read? Some people can learn how to read aloud Spanish within minutes (while others will need hours), so why wasting time MEMORIZING how to pronounce each word if there is an easy system in place?

Would you tell your students to memorize how to read the numbers from 1 to 100 one week, and then memorize from 100 to 200 the following week, until eventually they have memorized at least the first 100,000 numbers, or you'd tell them how to read ANY number?

• I agree. Learning basic letter sounds, dipthongs, etc. which can be done fairly quickly would free the students to read any word they encounter. - Nicole-B Aug 18, 2010
• lazarus! Welcome back, I have read so many of your posts and appreciate your responses. - foxluv Aug 18, 2010

Answer 3

Yes, there are a couple of different places on the site that will be useful to you, and to your students.

But as Lazarus pointed out here, and in different words to the same question before

Spanish is one of the few languages where the phonetic pronounciation is so regular and simple, that once you know how to read each letter separately, you can read all words. Someone ...shouldn't need more than an hour to read effortlessly.

Marianne referenced: How Spanish Letters Sound

I also recommend: Correct pronunciation of Spanish words

A great deal of reference material has been added to SpanishDict since your last visit. A lot of it can be found by clicking on Spanish Reference at the bottom of the page.

But the most productive tool on this site is the one that is most often over looked! - the search box located just below the green field where you found Ask A Question. Be sure to share that search box with your students, it will be like giving them the keys to the kingdom.

Answer 4

I don't really have anything to add.

I am also of the mindset that it makes much more sense to learn the phonetic patterns of the letters - including dipthongs - of a language (especially one whose phonetic system is highly standardized and simple to understand like Spanish or Japanese), and if you can see the reasoning behind this then you might find the following site helpful:

University of Iowa - Phonetics

• Great site. Thanks Izanoni. - sanlee Aug 18, 2010

Answer 5

It is not a question of being a visual/auditory learner. If you mean to insist on fake pseudo-English spellings because that is what is most familiar to you, the best that you can hope to achieve is to teach students to speak with an egregious English/American accent.

English and Spanish (an a bunch of other languages) share the use of the Roman alphabet to transcribe their languages,. They do not, however, all agree on the sound that is to be associated with each letter (English, for the most part,. can't even decide on a single sound to letter correspondence).

There is simply no way to represent Spanish (French, Italian, Japanese, whatever) pronunciation using "English" spelling. There are too many sounds that, simply, don't exist in English. Even if you are "aurally-challenged", that is no reason to assume that your students are equally incapable of hearing the distinctions. There are numerous web-sites that provide text-to-speech services. Avail yourself (and your students) of them.