Spanish for Kids Videos for Children

I would like to take this opportunity to address particular concerns when teaching Spanish pronunciation to English speaking students. In English, the alphabet is taught with the hard sounds A, E, I, O, U. Keep in mind that these five letters can produce any of twelve different vowel sounds. Spanish is VERY different, the letters "a, e, i, o, u" always have the sounds [a, e, i, o, u]. Students must be taught that the five Spanish vowels are always the same, if not, they will naturally assume that the Spanish vowels can be pronounced in a variety of ways.

Perhaps you have not noticed that Spanish vowels are much "shorter" than English vowels. Let's us consider as an example the English "no", which could be phonetically written as [nooou]. English has the propensity to elongate the vowels at the end of a word. In Spanish, although the sound of the vowel is the same, it is cut much shorter: [no]. While this is not as big of an issue with respect to learning pronunciation as the concept presented above, it is important to apply this in spoken Spanish if one wishes to speak like a native.

English-speakers have a tendency to add an additional vowel to the end of the vowel sounds [e] and [o] in Spanish. This must be avoided. One must pronounce a single, clear vowel, and avoid attaching a second vowel sound to create a new vowel sequence [ei] or [ou]. When a second vowel is added in Spanish, it creates an extremely "foreign" accent and can it can even change the meaning of the word you are attempting to say. These "artificial" diphthongs may seem like a small issue, but it is very important to produce the correct sound if you wish to avoid miscommunication.