The Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation: Some Reflections on Two Recent Texts

Abstract

traditional school folk-ways lead us actually to confuse sounds (acoustic events) and letters (marks on paper). We confuse the relatively simple problem of learning to identify spellings with sounds, with the relatively difficult problem of learning to produce the sounds of a new language and to apprehend them as a phonemic system.' The second reason for the difference in popular belief as to ease of pronouncing French and Spanish is, I believe, a difference in the way English speakers hear the two foreign languages; and this in turn results less from a difference in the degree to which each phonetic system differs from the English than from a difference in the ways in which they differ. French has many sounds which are not in the English repertory-at least not at all prominently-while Spanish has few sounds which strike our ears as something new. But the distribution of these Spanish sounds, and especially the way in which the sounds of careful speech differ from those of careless speech are vastly different in Spanish and English. The result is a deceptive similarity; and deceptive similarity is often a greater obstacle to understanding than an obvious difference.