The Spanish alphabet and pronunciation

The Spanish alphabet has 27 letters: the 26 you know from English plus ñ. The names of the letters are feminine: la be, la hache. You need them to spell your name or an address: ¿Cómo se escribe? (How do you spell it?)

ch and ll used to count as separate letters, and you'll still see them listed in older dictionaries. Today they are pairs of letters, like rr. k and w appear mainly in words from other languages.

In Spain v is called uve and w uve doble. In much of Latin America they are ve (or ve corta) and doble ve, and b is often be larga or be alta. The official name of y is ye, but many people still call it i griega.

b and v sound exactly the same, so when people spell on the phone they often add a word: be de Barcelona, uve de Valencia.

Spanish has only five vowel sounds, and they never change. Each vowel is short and clear, even in an unstressed syllable, where English often turns vowels into a weak “uh”. Say every vowel you see: chocolate has four clear syllables, cho-co-la-te.

When i or u meets another vowel, the two are usually said together in one syllable: bien, bueno, agua, ciudad. Keep both sounds, just say them quickly.

Most consonants sound roughly as in English. These are the ones to watch. The pronunciation given is the standard of central and northern Spain, which this course teaches; the main Latin American differences are in brackets.

A few letters change their sound depending on the vowel after them: c and g are hard before a, o and u, and soft before e and i. That is why gue, gui, que and qui have a silent u: it keeps the hard sound.

Every Spanish word with more than one syllable has one stressed syllable, and simple rules tell you which one. Words that end in a vowel, n or s are stressed on the second-to-last syllable: casa, hablan, zapatos. Words that end in any other consonant are stressed on the last syllable: hablar, ciudad, español.

When a word breaks these rules, a written accent (´) marks the stressed vowel: café, canción, árbol. Words stressed on the third-to-last syllable always have one: teléfono, música. The accent can disappear in the plural, because the stress now follows the rule: canción, canciones.

A few short words have an accent only to tell them apart from another word: tú (you) and tu (your), él (he) and el (the), sí (yes) and si (if). Question words always have one: ¿qué?, ¿dónde?, ¿cómo? Questions and exclamations also start with an upside-down mark: ¿Qué tal? ¡Hola!

Listen to each word or sentence, then say it out loud. Keep the vowels short and clear, and don't let the stress move. Start with the pairs below: a single r is a quick tap, rr is rolled, and the difference changes the meaning.