Spanish pronunciation course syllabus

This course will get you no credits. There are no grades, no textbooks and no assignments. In a perfect world, the objective of this course would be to make you sound like a native Spanish speaker. In a world where pronunciation practice just gets juggled along with work, studies, friends and family, we´ll have to lower the bar a bit. Understanding the many processes that take place in our mouths, realizing the potential of our speech organs and acquiring the ability to consciously change the sounds we produce will have to do. It still sounds like hard work, hu? Well, it is.

Unit #1 is all about the sounds. ¿What is it that gives a language its particular "feel"? When we speak a second language, those sounds and features of our mother tongue seem to give us away. The set of characteristics that define the overall "feel" of a language is called base of articulation-I´ve written about it in this post.

Unit #2 goes about describing isolated sounds. Words are easy, they are either nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions or modifiers, but what about sounds? How can we tell the difference between vowel and bowel, between /b/ and /v/? Every sound has a unique combination of three features, and that allows us to tag them and tell them apart.

Units #3, #4, #5 and #6 deal with consonants, starting with the major groups, the fricatives and the plosives. You can read about them here or here. On the /r/ you can read these posts, and I´ve written this one about the /l/.

Unit #7 deals with vowels. We´ve already said there are +12 vowels sounds in English and only 5 in Spanish... it´s only a matter of cutting them down. Sort of. This post will give you an idea.

Units #8 and #9 are hard. First, #8, word stress -that´s really not that hard, at least compared to #9, intonation. A lousy intonation is probably one of the main reasons English speakers can´t be understood in the first place; you guys just apply the same intonation patterns you use in English, and believe me, it doesn´t work that way.


You can take the course alone or with friends, and classes usually consist of one or two hours once a week, in your place, mine, or at my college. The first class is always free. For more info on days, rates, or if you just want to ask me something about phonetics, write to martin.ventola (a) gmail (.) com.

If you´re interested in shaking that gringo accent off, but don´t want to take the course yet, why don´t you subscribe to my RSS feed? I´ll be posting some usefull tips and exercises from my own classes every week. Sort of.