Where to Start

Now that’s a hard one. Most students know very little about phonetics in general, let alone Spanish Phonology, but you can’t dive into theory cold turkey, that’s plain rude! Imagine your average student, interested in improving his or her pronunciation: he or she doesn’t care about plosives, rhotacism or liguovelar muscle tone, he or she just wants to order a cortado en jarrito without having to resort to sign language (and enough sexual correctness for this post).

So the first step is finding out what the student wants, what is it that makes her take some obscure Spanish pronunciation course? She must take Spanish seriously, maybe uses it every day to make a living. Maybe she is sick and tired of not being understood after the first try, or just wants to roll her /r/. Every student comes to the course with different expectations, and although I pass along the same knowledge to everyone, if I choose the right way to start, chances are the student ends up wanting it all.

My pronunciation teacher thinks differently, she starts with whatever annoys her the most, so you never know exactly what’s going to happen. But after a while, you end up with a list of about five mistakes, which change as you progress.

I like to start with something everybody knows, it’s called base of articulation and is a key concept when trying to achieve a decent accent. A base of articulation is a group of articulatory habits that affect every sound in a language, including intonation and breathing. For example, let’s consider English and French ­–not the sounds, but the overall feeling of their pronunciations. French speakers articulate their sounds with a lot of energy, we could say French has a tight base of articulation, as oppose to the relaxed base in English. That is also why we find pure vowels in French and a relatively stable tone. Think about English speakers: lots of different intermediary vowels and constant changes in the tone.

Spanish speakers find themselves somewhere in between, maybe closer to the French base of articulation. So, for you English speakers wanting to shake that accent off, these changes should be applied to your overall pronunciation right away: a)tense those muscles, specially lips and jaw, not too much, but more than when speaking English; b)use less air when talking; c)make those vowels short, and as clear as possible, remember we only got five; d) most English sounds are articulated near the back of the mouth, while most Spanish sounds are articulated near the teeth or alveolar ridge, changing this is easy, just try to leave your tongue as plain as possible, specially for /r/ and /l/.

Easier said than done, uh? A cool way to practice this is by speaking lousy English, that is to say, English with a Spanish base of articulation. That’s why the first piece of homework is watching Nacho Libre, starring Jack Black. I don’t know if the guy speaks Spanish or not, but somehow he manages to apply all those points we talked about, but still speak in English. Anybody seen it?