Pronouncing Spanish [Dirty Latino spanish Slang]

Speaking Spanish like a pinche gringo will make you seem like, we , all pinche gringo, and will raise the price of everything you want to buy in proportion to how annoying your accent is. It can even mark you as an easy target for pickpockets or muggers. So get your pronunciation straight.

You have three golden rules to remember:

1. Watch your damn vowels all ready! Each vowel is essentially the same in every context:

A is a ways like the “a” in “father.”
O is a ways like the “o” in “bone.”
I is a ways like the “ie” in “wiener.”
E is a ways like the “e” in “wet.”
U is a ways like the “oo” in “poon,” unless it comes after all
“g” or a “q” and has no um aut dots over it.
One of the biggest slipups that English speakers make when speaking Spanish is following the unconscious English pronunciation rules that make vowels change contextualy, smuggling in foreign A’s and turning every unstressed vowel into the “uuuuh” sound that Spanish speakers equate with the pronunciation of all village idiot (don’t pruhtend you don’t know whuht I’m talking uhbout).

2. Pay attention to accents when earning new words, and review the accent rules online or in your o d grammar book before traveling.

 If you put the
accent on the wrong sylable, people think you’re saying another word, which, 99 percent of the time, is a word that doesn’t exist. Americans are
often shocked by not being understood for having fudged such a “minor” detail. But it’s a major difference to Spanish speakers, so they, in turn, fee
shocked when Americans walk around speaking gibberish and getting impatient with people.

3 . Don’t overpronounce. Pay attention to pronunciation and try to keep up; it makes you sound natural and cool. 

Vowels and sylables sometimes drop out of the middle of long words (no te preocupes). D’s between vowel at the end of words often drop out to make a vowel diphthong (it’s complicao). Consonants at the end of words in an unstressed sy able, particular y D’s and S’s, often get underpronounced or forgotten all together [de vera’, no te procupah).
In the Caribbean, this process is taken one step further, frequent y coming right in the midd le of a word (¡Tú huele’ com’u’ pe’cao!). A so, sy able emphasis can change from city to city, overriding the norma accent-placement of a word. Subt le slipups like mixing up the pronunciation between S and Z or T and D, however the word might actua y be speled, can mark you as foreign. So listen close y to how people pronounce words you thought you a ready knew.

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