Pronunciation as a stumbling block to learning Spanish
Despite
acing four years of high school Spanish, I still get tongue-tied
when I want to exchange simple "Hi, how are you"s with native Spanish
speakers. For a long time, I attributed the problem to my visual
learning style, but I've recently concluded that the flaw in
my education is primarily pronunciation. I memorized scads of
vocabulary words and grammatical rules, but since I was very rarely
able to hear a
native Spanish speaker say the words I was learning, the sounds are
imprinted
in my head very differently than they should be. As a result,
when a waitress in a Mexican restaurant says "Buenos dias. Como
esta used?", it takes me far too long to decipher what she's saying.
In preparation for our
cruise to Mexico
last year, I decided to brush
up on my Spanish. I got Berlitz's
Spanish in 30 Days
out of the library, listened and
studied valiantly for a couple of weeks, then gave up. I was
capable of memorizing the phrases on the tape, but my fluency was
clearly going nowhere.
With
another Mexican cruise on the horizon, I decided to try
again. This time, I stumbled across Platiquemos, a Spanish
language course based on the U.S.'s FSI program. The first
two lessons are nearly entirely devoted to pronunciation, and after two
weeks of serious listening, I'm finally starting to understand what the
speakers say on the tape without memorizing phrase by phrase!
I was a bit shocked to
learn that nearly every Spanish consonant seems to have a
different pronunciation than in English --- for some reason, I was
under the misapprehension that the vowel sounds were the primary
difference. The written portion of the Platiquemos course
explains in deep linguistic detail how to hold your tongue when
pronouncing these new sounds, as well as explaining which English
sounds the Spanish most
closely resembles. I found this portion of the course deeply
difficult,
but could tell it was the part that did me the most good. If I
pored over a section in detail, pausing constantly to
figure out the rules, then slept on the resulting confusion, by morning
my head
seemed to have sorted the pronounciation out.
I'm still at the very
beginning of the course, but I highly recommend
Platiquemos to anyone else who feels
like they should be better at
speaking and listening to Spanish and can't quite figure out where
their
stumbling block lies. Chances are that like mine, your problem is
99% pronunciation.
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