Spanish is claimed to be one of the easiest language to acquire, and the greatest thing about its sounds is their consistency: they always sound the same, no matter where in a word you find them. It is not quite as steady in this sense as Georgian, but the rules are simple enough to get to know them once and proceed on your way being awesome at the language.
An English "a" makes a different sound in words "cat", "cave", "car", "call", "candy", "cadet". Noticed? Not in Spanish. It has 5 vowels that always make the same sound: a is always "ah"; e is always "eh"; i is always "ee"; o is always "oh"; and u is always "oo". Most of the consonant sounds are pronounced the way you'd expect them to, very close to their English counterparts. So only a handful of letters will require "special attention".
And one of them is that representative of the Spanish language: letter ñ, the one you see and just know — this is Spanish, baby. As you know, Spanish comes from Latin, but the letter ñ doesn’t. The sound that it conveys used to be represented in Latin by five different combinations: "nn" (as in "annus" or "donna"), "mn" (in words like "somnus"), "gn" (in words like "pugnus"), "ng" (in words like "ringere"), or "ni" + vowel (in words like "senior"). This would be the origin of Spanish words with Latin roots: "año" (year), "doña" (lady), "sueño" (dream), "puño" (fist), "reñir" (to scold), or "señor" (sir).
Even so the letter ñ was not officially incorporated into the Spanish alphabet until 1803! And it was actually at risk of disappearing, at least from the written language. Funny that, but its today's shape ñ got only thanks to a lack of parchment paper in 12th century, so to minimize costs and save time "twin n" (nn) transformed into one "n" with a smaller "n" on top, and then into "n" with a squiggly line on top, called "tilde", indicating at the time that the letter was doubled — ñ.
Even though ñ is often looked at as a symbol of Spanish identity, this letter is not unique to Spanish, but surely no other language that incorporated this letter is as broadly known. it's used in Galician and Asturian, Basque language Euskera, and several indigenous languages like Mixtec, Quechua, Aymara, and others.
Talking about that diacritic mark of tilde, there is another one used in Spanish sometimes, but just like stresses over vowels it appears only when needed (that is a rare occasion, really). It is called "diairesis" and in Spanish only "pops up" over letter u: ü. When this happens, which isn't often and normally "locked" between a "g" and a vowel, you are expected to pronounce the "u", as opposed to omitting it.
Compare: "guitarra" (ghee-tuh-rruh) and "pingüino" (pin-gwee-noh). Notice how it is ghee in the first word (as if there is no "u" in the word at all) and gwee in the second? This is why Spanish keeps diairesis around. To be fair, the amount of words with it in Spanish that you'll actually use or see somewhere can be counted with one hand. The full list, if you're curious, see here.
This sign of diairesis over "u" and the tilde in "ñ" are the only diacritic marks in Spanish, besides acute accents over vowels when the stress doesn't follow a standard rule, which we talked about before. As you can see, the language is indeed very welcoming for English learners.
Master the "r" rolling, spend 15 minutes getting to know Spanish consonant sounds, and when you see letter "h", do not pronounce it at all as if it's not even there — and you are prepared to read any Spanish text! That easy!
And now it is time for our last Episode on Spanish and some more fun!
Chau! (Chuh-oo!) Bye!
"Tháñk yoü, Lañgvéntüre!"
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