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My family back in Madrid would have a hard time understanding the Spanish of my English-speaking students in my first-semester classroom. There's good reason f
by brlewis 8y ago
My family back in Madrid would have a hard time understanding the Spanish of my English-speaking students in my first-semester classroom.
There's good reason for this. In English, if you pronounce a vowel wrong or leave it out, you have an accent. If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible. Spanish is closer to the reverse, where the vowels are essential and the consonants are supplemental. If you're native to one language you'll need a lot of pronunciation drills to get good at the other.
- kevinmchugh 8y ago> If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible I don't know anything about Spanish but this seems like an overgeneralization for English. There's rhotic and non-rhotic accents. Public figures start dropping their gs to appear folksy. My dad's side of the family says "the" as "da" and they're understood if occasionally lightly mocked.
- brlewis 8y agoI'm overgeneralizing both on the English side and the Spanish side. But there's enough truth in my description to cause speakers of one language to focus on the wrong parts of pronouncing the other language.