The Letters

Spelling

English spelling is hard. Our advice? Practice. Watch movies with the subtitles on. Listen along to the audio tape of a book you're reading.

What can we say? This is what you get for being a wonderful hodgepodge of different languages fused into one.

Like, check out the following tomfoolery:

• great
• eight
• late
• strait

Those words rhyme, bro. It's a daunting task to learn English spelling, but it certainly is doable.

The Alphabet

The Spanish and English alphabets are pretty much the same; Spanish just has a few extra letters: ch, ñ, ll, and rr. Since some of those look like two letters, we'll call them segments instead.

Well, that's pretty much it. Those are the differences. You're done. Thank you and goodnight, Shmoopers.

Just kidding. Let's talk about how the pronunciation of these segments differ.

Vowels

Spanish has way fewer vowel sounds than English. Sure, both languages have the same vowels in the alphabet, but English has about a billion different ways to pronounce them.

If you've learned the Spanish alphabet, you've probably practice the Spanish vowels out loud over and over again: ba, be, bi, bo, bu.

You've probably also learned the diphthongs: bai, bia, bei, bie, boi, bio, bui, biu, etc. These are any combination of a weak vowel (U, I) and a strong vowel (A, E, O), or two weak vowels. Any other combination of two vowels would be two syllables.

English has all those sounds and more, as well as (ready for this?) triphthongs. Triphthongs are three vowel sounds in one syllable. Dang.

When speaking English, you'll probably use the Spanish vowel that most closely resembles the English vowel you're trying to pronounce. So, "happy" is pronounced like "hah-pi" and "coffee" is pronounced like "kah-fi." Don't worry, though: the same thing happens for English speakers learning Spanish.

Consonants

Now, you might be thinking, "Hooray! Pretty much the same alphabet. Being bilingual is easy." Not so fast there, Shmooper. Here's a documentation of all the consonant troubles that ELLs have.

The letters Q and C: English mainly uses the letter "q" to make the "kw" sound at the beginning or middle of words: quack, quest, quintuplets, quotient, queen, aqua.

And the "k" sound at the end of words: technique, pique.

There are exceptions, though (ahem, turquoise). There are always exceptions in English…

The letter G: In English, you pretty much just pronounce the letter G as soft or hard, like with garage, budge, and green. The soft G sound (like in genre or gentle) doesn't exist like this in Spanish—people tend to use the "y" sound instead.

The letters Z and S: In English, these sounds are different: you vibrate your vocal cords when you pronounced the Z; for the letter S, you don't. In Latin American Spanish, they're pronounced the same (usually). This is why Spanish ELLs pronounce "busy" like "bih-see" or "crazy" like "crey-see." Likewise, you can always tell a non-native speaker of Spanish if they voice the Z in Spanish all the time.

The letter R: American English is one of the only languages with the type of "r" sound that sounds like growling or a pirate. This is why people who try and imitate American English exaggerate the "r" sound a lot.

The letters B and V: In most dialects of Spanish, both B and V are pronounced the same. In English, they're pronounced differently. The letter B in English is pronounced just like in the Spanish word "burbuja."

The letter V, though, is a labiodental. This means that instead of putting your lips together to pronounce it (which would make it a B), you press your upper teeth against your lower lip. It sounds sort of like a motorcycle: a low, breathy vibration that you can feel in your throat.