Pronunciation of accents?
This is kind of a stupid question, but how do you distinguish between tu and tú, como and comó, and que and qúe when someone is talking to you? Is there any way besides context?
2 Answers
¿Cómo? and ¿qué? will usually be said with a question in the voice which will help you, but yes, for tú and tu, context will be the key, although the difficulty won't arise too often as the subject pronouns (yo, tú, él, ella etc) are not often used unless the person wants to stress the person being referred to or the meaning might be ambiguous.
Tu followed by a noun is usually a bit of a giveaway that it's the possessive pronoun 'your' instead of the personal pronoun, 'you'. Although if you're using particularly bad table manners and the noun following tú is cerdo that might be another matter altogether jeje.
Well, in my opinion context is the better/only way. You said "when someone is talking to you", and in that context, your brain is not trying to spell words or figure out which 'rule' it might apply, it's just listening to the sounds and trying to parse them.
For instance, if my wife said to me ¿Quién eres tu? I would know from the sound that she's asking me "Who are you" and not "who is your...", so I've obviously misspelled "tú" here, so "tu" just doesn't make sense. But she's not writing the question, she's talking, I can't "see" the tilde (accent) on the "u", only hear it. Of course, it should be spelled "eres tú". If I ask you ¿Cuál es tu favorita? you only have the sounds of the words, but from the context you would know that I am asking you "which is your favorite?". Writing "tú favorita" doesn't make any sense, but since there is no difference in sound, context is everything. HTH, and hope this wasn't too much of a ramble.
