Try this, your Spanish will sound more natural

Want your Spanish to instantly sound more natural?

There’s one simple thing you can tweak.

It’s a lot easier than rolling your R’s or figuring out the different D’s.

In fact, it involves removing a sound, so you don’t actually have to learn anything new.

So today, let’s look at…

• What this tweak is
• Why it makes such a difference
• And how to make it an automatic habit

To explain this change, I first need to explain what we do in English.

In English, we are like kids on a trampoline.

We jump from one sound, bounce off another, then land on the next.

Often, the sound we bounce off of is not even written. 

For example:

• if we say “to ask”, we “bounce” off of an imaginary W:
  
  “to ask” → “to-wask”
  
• In “he asked”, we bounce off a Y sound:
  
  “he asked” → “he-yasked”
  
• And on the other side of both ponds from me, you can hear an R used as a bounce sound:
  
  “law and order” → “law-r-and order”.

We speak our new language with a foreign accent when we apply sound patterns from our language to the new one.

And this is a pattern we apply liberally (and without realizing it).

It’s like our English brains force us to bounce from one sound to another.

There are lots of places where we do this in Spanish.

But in my experience working with hundreds of students on their pronunciation, there is one place we English speakers do this the most.

And when my students make this change, I’ve seen it make an enormous difference right away.

But before I tell you what the change is, I want you to say these words aloud — slowly —and see if you notice anything:

1. De España
2. Me encanta
3. Este es
4. Que el

Did you do it? No? It’s okay, I wouldn’t have either. But trust me, it’s important and takes 6 seconds.

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.

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Notice anything?

Alright, so the mistake 99% of English speakers make looks like this:

E E → EyE

What does that mean?

It means the words above sound like this:

de España → deyEspaña

me encanta → meyencanta

que el → queyel

este es → esteyes

We apply our English habit to Spanish E’s, bouncing off a Y sound.

In theory, to fix this, all you need to do is cut out the Y:

DeEspaña, meencanta, queel, estees.

But in practice, that doesn’t always work.

Our muscle memory is so baked in, meaning that Y will sneak back in as soon as you stop paying attention.

So often, we need a second step: cutting out the first E.

Think of it like this:

De España → d’España

Me encanta → M’encanta

que el → qu’el

este es → est’es

If you listen closely to Spanish speakers, they rarely pronounce both E’s anyway.

Want to hear my breakdown of this sound? Here’s a quick video:

Here’s how to solidify this:

One piece of advice I often give students is this (not my original advice, although I don’t remember where I first heard it):

Once you finally “get” a new sound…. Immediately compare it to the old sound.

Jump back and forth between the correct Spanish sound, and your old way of saying it.

If you can, record yourself saying those word combinations as written above and listen to how much more Spanish/Mexican/etc it sounds when you say it the new way.

This exercise draws your attention to what’s happening in your mouth when you say it the “English way”….

So that you can more easily correct yourself next time you do it.

After all, pronunciation changes almost never stick right away. We have to keep chipping away at it.

Connor 


P.S. If you want to improve your pronunciation step-by-step with me, join hundreds of others here, where you’ll build an accent that fills your conversations with confidence.