Reading Spanish

Spanish spelling is among the most regular in Europe: see a word and you can say it; hear it and you can nearly spell it. There are five vowels — a, e, i, o, u — always pure and always full, never reduced to a murmur as in English (or as in Catalan and Portuguese, which weaken their unstressed vowels). The few traps are consonants whose sound depends on the vowel that follows, and a handful of letters that spell the same sound.

Letters that depend on their neighbors

Tap and trill

Spanish has two r sounds. A single r between vowels is a tap [ɾ]: one quick flick of the tongue tip, like the tt of American English better. Written rr — and r at the start of a word or after n, l, s — is a trill [r]: several flicks in a row (rojo, perro, honra). The difference makes words: pero 'but' / perro 'dog', caro 'expensive' / carro 'cart', coro 'choir' / corro 'I run'. Italian has the same pair (caro / carro), and so has Catalan (para 'stops' / parra 'vine'). Portuguese keeps the contrast in spelling (caro / carro), but in Brazil rr and initial r are a breathy [h]: carro [ˈkahu]. Romanian has a single tongue-tip r with no contrast; French has neither.

Soft b, d, g

Spanish b, d and g are full stops only after a pause or a nasal (and d after l): bien, un dedo, tengo, caldo. Everywhere else — above all between vowels — the closure relaxes into a fricative: the lips nearly touch for [β], the tongue tip rests lightly against the teeth for [ð] (the th of English this, but softer), and the back of the tongue only approaches the palate for [ɣ]. So lobo is [ˈloβo], cada [ˈkaða], lago [ˈlaɣo], and la boda flows as [la ˈβoða]. Natives never notice it; learners who close fully sound stiff. Catalan softens its b, d, g in the same places (and so does European Portuguese); French, Italian, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese keep them full.

Stress and the written accent

Two rules place the stress, and the written accent marks every exception. Words ending in a vowel, n or s are stressed on the second-to-last syllable (casa, hablan, libros); words ending in any other consonant on the last (hablar, ciudad, papel). A word that breaks the rule carries an accent on the stressed vowel — café, canción, árbol, lápiz — and so does every word stressed further back: música, teléfono. The accent also splits two vowels that would otherwise share a syllable (día, país) and tells short words apart: tú 'you' / tu 'your', él 'he' / el 'the', sí 'yes' / si 'if', más 'more' / mas 'but'. Portuguese and Catalan work the same way — default rules plus an accent for the exceptions — with rules of their own; Romanian, unlike all three, never writes stress.