What are your top 3 most difficult words to pronounce in Spanish?

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#1

Last year @gerhild_chatterbug shared with us some words in Spanish, that for her are difficult to pronounce.

Her top 3 there were:

  • pronunciación
  • ascensor
  • euro

My advice to her would be to break the words into parts, for example: pro-nun-cia-ción . When we do that it is also important to do it slowly and after that, our muscles will have more training in order to say the word faster.

Furthermore, I think it is important to exaggerate a little when we pronounce specific letters or words that are more complicated to us. No worries you don’t need to do it in front of your friends or your teacher :sweat_smile:. You can practice this exercise alone at home by reading a book :open_book: out loud.

And you? What are your top 3 most difficult words to pronounce in Spanish? :thinking:
Do you have other tips for @gerhild_chatterbug? :blush:

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#2

Straight off the bat the word el/la estadounidense came to mind. :see_no_evil:
I am always struggling with this word but, like you said, if I break it down and say it slowly, I can get through it!

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#3

I can agree with Gerhild, as a German, the eu sound sometimes makes me stumble. Terapeutico. Eugenio.

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#4

I used to have a lot of trouble with aereolinea. Too many vowels! And when I was younger our teacher used to challenge us to say “ferrocarril” to practice rolling our rr’s.

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#5

esternocleidomastoideo I would say, a muscle in the neck hahaha. It is difficult for me as a Spanish person :rofl:

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#6

Exercises like saying “ferrocarril” and tongue twisters are very useful and fun to practice pronunciation :blush:.

#7

Most of the people I tutor have a problem with this word :laughing: , but I try to break it for them to make it easier.

I think one of the things I repeat the most when it comes to an easier way of understanding words, it’s that we have to take a certain distance from the language we speak and try to see it as something not related at all with the language that we already know .

Most of the mistakes that I see when it comes to reading words in spanish is basically related with diphthongs, which in english or in other languages are different. Sometimes just helping the person to understand that two vowels together don’t make a new sound but instead make a sound by themselves seems to help :hugs: .

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#8

Pronunciation is for me not that difficult in Spanish. But in some areas here in Ecuador, the “ll” and even the “r” is pronounced like “sh”. And that is a challenge to understand. Also, native Quichua speakers tend to speak Spanish without “e” and “o” (doesn’t exist in Quichua). In these cases, I also have to listen well to get it.

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