Linking in spoken Spanish

Question

Linking in spoken Spanish makes it more difficult for me--a beginner-- to both understand Spanish sentences-because the more obvious word breaks aren't there- and to correctly say the sentence in Spanish when reading it. The 2 words become one and the syllable breaks, phonetics,..all change..its frustrating. Any comments, I have some word groups below as examples..could you define the new sounds ?

a ella la escuela la iglesia a usted puedo encontrar libro aburrido una otra son nuevos

Thanks, Tom

Answer 1

It does take some getting used to, but there's nothing unique about Spanish. All languages tend to blend words together. The pronunciation of the words doesn't change in Spanish (well, not much - barring local dialects), but there generally isn't a complete stop between words in any language. It just takes practice.

elisión (dropping vowels from ends of words before another vowel) doesn't help either. - 0074b507, Jan 16, 2012

No, neither does the removal of S's and D's, as in Caribbean Spanish. - KevinB, Jan 16, 2012

Answer 2

My first reaction was to say that this was a universal language phenomenon. On further consideration, I would say very common. There are some 6,000 languages in the world and I only have experience with about a dozen. Furthermore, upon reflection, I couldn't think of any cases in Chinese (more precisely, Mandarin) or Vietnamese. It seems to be quite common in the Romance languages (well, Spanish, French and Italian, at any rate). It's not uncommon in Japanese and (at least sometimes) in Arabic. I don't know of cases in German but English (another Germanic language) is full of such cases.

As for distortions of sounds, that rarely occurs in Spanish. What one most frequently encounters is a lengthening/blending of adjacent vowels. English does not distinguish between single/double vowels/consonants but many languages do. In the Spanish "para alcanzar ..." the final and initial 'a' sounds are blended but their combined duration is slightly longer than a simple 'a' between consonants. English makes no distinction "(in speaking) between single/double consonants/vowels, so you probably don't hear the difference. Spanish (where they only occur between words) and, Italian and Japanese, on the other hand lengthen the sounds. English, on the other hand, alters vowels and drops consonants with abandon in speaking.