Does these lesson cover phonics in spanish?
Does these lesson cover phonics in spanish?
4 Answers
There are no specific videos dedicated to learning the sounds of Spanish here, but I do try to address and explain many of the "different" sounds as I go along. For example, when teaching greetings, I explained that "Hola" is pronounced like "Oh'-lah" because Hs at the beginning of a word are silent in Spanish. But please do refer to the links given by hhmdirrocco and myself to read more information on pronunciation in Spanish.
I don't know if the lessons cover pronunciation, but there is an excellent article on this in the Reference section. See Spanish alphabet - how do letters sound. Using these rules, you can quickly learn to "read" Spanish orally, pronouncing correctly, without even understanding what you are reading. How's that for simple?!
It is recommended, of course, that you have exposure to native speakers to be able to train your ear to hear and distinguish the sounds/words, and to learn the proper accent to mimic.
Unlike English, Spanish pronunciation is very consistent. Each letter has its pronunciation (a few have one variant) and it is pronounced that way 100% of the time (except for dealing with foreign words, of course). The variant pronunciations of the corresponding letters are explained in the article.
Next, we need to convince Lazarus to put up an article on syllable stress and division, which is also very logical and consistent in Spanish, more so than in any other language I have studied.
I believe it was Lazarus who gave this site out as far as pronunciations go but stressed never to use Maria on the site (I guess she sounds a little different) but instead use Antonio.
http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html
I think he also suggested (awhile ago) http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/# and of course choose Spanish.
This is not an answer, but rather another question to clarify the question.)
Because Spanish is written very much like it is pronounced, when I read your query, I thought that you may be asking if Spanish phonetics are (is?) covered in the lessons. (By the way, I do not know the answer.)
Just to be sure I looked up the English meaning for both phonics and phonetics. I found:
phonetics n. study of the representation and production of speech sounds, study of phonetic systems (Linguistics)
phonics n. system of teaching reading using the phonetic sound value of grouped letters; phonetics
As you can see, "phonetics" is actually given as one of the meanings for phonics in the dictionary I looked in (Oxford Concise English Dictionary). I nonetheless figured that making a distinction might help ensure that the question is clear. I would assume you want to know whether or not the lessons cover the study of the speech sounds.
I think it would be terrific if SpanishDict.com would add a phonetics (maybe it would be called "pronunciation") category to the Answers (questions/forum) categories in addition to ones such as "General", "Vocabulary and Grammar", etc.
