English pronunciation for Spanish speakers: what changes the word, with real lines

Practise one line now

Open the B and V exercise

The exercise opens on one line from Shawn Achor’s talk at 10:24: “In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves.” It has V in “we’ve”, “every” and “improves”, and B in “business”. Listen, record your version, then open Compare and play your take beside the original. No account is needed, and recordings stay on your device.

What Sada can and cannot tell you

Sada checks which of your words came across and how your timing compares with the speaker. It does not grade individual sounds, stress or pitch. When a feature makes another word (very → berry, eyes → ice, asked → ask), that word may show as missed. When it does not, as with “tink” for “think”, the recogniser often hears the right word, so a matched word does not prove every sound in it was the one you aimed for.

Judge the sounds by ear: play your take next to the speaker. To hear one word on its own, use a dictionary with audio such as Cambridge’s pronunciation dictionary; for sound-by-sound feedback you need a teacher or a tool that scores individual sounds.

Clarity first

Your Spanish will always be heard in your English, and that is fine: millions of people speak clear English with a Spanish accent. What gets in the way is the small set of habits that turn one English word into another, or that make a listener work hard to follow. Spanish speakers from Mexico, Spain, Argentina or Colombia do not all bring the same habits, so treat this page as a list to check, not a diagnosis.

Research on English between speakers of different first languages points the same way. Jennifer Jenkins’s Lingua Franca Core counts as essential most consonants, keeping the consonants at the start of a word, the difference between long and short vowels, and stressing the word that carries a contrast; it counts the TH sounds themselves as not essential. The table below follows that idea: what can change the word comes first.

Which features change the word

The features, one by one

1. Vowels: ship and sheep

Spanish has five vowels, A, E, I, O and U, and each one keeps its sound (SpanishDict’s guide to the sounds of Spanish). English has about a dozen, plus vowels that glide, and length matters: the I of “ship” is short and loose, the EE of “sheep” long and tense. Listen for the pairs that Spanish vowels can merge: I and EE (live, leave), U and OO (full, fool), and A, U and O (cat, cut, cot). Add the ER of “work” and “bird”, which Spanish does not have at all. Say these pairs, making the second one longer: ship, sheep; sit, seat; full, fool.

“We live in an incredibly busy world.”

Andy Puddicombe · 0:15 · Practise this line →

The short I of “live” and “busy”: short and relaxed, not the long EE of “leave”.

“I worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked.”

Amy Cuddy · 17:02 · Practise this line →

Three vowels Spanish does not have: the ER of “worked”, the short U of “lucky”, and the O of “got”.

More pairs like these, each with two real lines: minimal pairs practice.

2. B and V

In Spanish, B and V are two letters for one sound: “beso” and “vaso” start the same way (The Sounds of Spanish, Cambridge University Press). English keeps them apart. For B, close both lips, then open them. For V, rest your top teeth on your lower lip and let the voice buzz through; the lips never close. Say these pairs: berry, very; ban, van; best, vest; boat, vote.

“Believing that the best way to prove yourself is to improve yourself,”

Adam Grant · 14:45 · Practise this line →

B in “believing” and “best”, the lips closed; V in “believing”, “prove” and “improve”, the top teeth on the lower lip.

“I've been living in Los Angeles for 2 years and I've never been this cold in my”

Conan O’Brien · 0:06 · Practise this line →

B and V take turns: “I’ve been living … I’ve never been”. Keep the two apart every time.

More V lines, with F and W, in V and F pronunciation.

3. S at the start of a word

No Spanish word starts with S and another consonant: Spanish says “estudiar”, “España”, “escuela”. So “study”, “Spain” and “school” often get an E in front. Listeners usually understand, but every “es” adds a syllable, and in a fast line that is where you fall behind. Start with a long hiss, “ssss”, then add the word: “ssss-tudy”, “ssss-pain”.

“No big deal. Just three stories.”

Steve Jobs · 0:52 · Practise this line →

“stories” starts straight on the S, with no E in front: not “estories”.

“In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school.”

Dan Pink · 0:34 · Practise this line →

“school”, not “eschool”: hiss the S, then the K.

4. Endings: -ed, -s and final consonants

Spanish words end in a vowel or in one of a few consonants, mostly N, S, L, R and D, so English endings such as “asked”, “texts” and “world” are easy to cut short. When the dropped sound is a grammar ending, the word changes: “asked” becomes “ask”, “books” becomes “book”. The opposite also happens: reading the spelling, many learners say every -ed as a separate “ed”, as in “work-ed”. The -ed is a syllable only after T or D (“started”, “needed”); after other sounds it is just T or D (“worked”, “lived”). And because Spanish words do not end in M, “him” and “team” can come out as “hin” and “tean”: close your lips at the end.

“I was stressed, and I was frustrated.”

Oprah Winfrey · 6:01 · Practise this line →

“stressed” is one syllable that ends in T; “frustrated” ends in “id”. The -ed is spoken, but not as a separate “ed” every time.

“Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years,”

Dan Gilbert · 3:19 · Practise this line →

The -sked of “asked” and the -xt of “next”: drop the ending and “asked” becomes “ask”.

When -ed is T, D or “id”, with more lines: -ed endings pronunciation.

5. Z

Spanish has an S but no Z sound of its own; a Z sound appears only before some consonants, as in “mismo” or “desde” (Spanish phonology). English Z is S with the voice on: the same tongue, the same hiss, plus a buzz you can feel in your throat. It matters because many plurals and common words end in Z: “is”, “was”, “days”, “eyes”. Pairs: ice, eyes; price, prize; rice, rise.

“Could be book, could be DVDs, could be courses, could be anything.”

Josh Kaufman · 10:38 · Practise this line →

A buzzing Z at the end of “DVDs”, and “iz” at the end of “courses”.

“And I’m always prepared to be amazed, and I'm never disappointed.”

Celeste Headlee · 11:09 · Practise this line →

Z in “always” and “amazed”: an S with the voice on.

6. H, Y and J

Spanish writes an H it never says, and its J is a rough sound at the back of the mouth. English H is softer than that, only breath, as if you were fogging a mirror, and it is spoken: drop it and “hold” becomes “old”, “heat” becomes “eat”. Y and J are a second pair: in many Spanish accents the Y of “yo” comes close to English J, so “yes” can sound like “Jess” and “yet” like “jet”. For Y, the tongue does not touch the roof of the mouth; for J, it touches first, then lets go.

“What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life?”

Robert Waldinger · 0:12 · Practise this line →

A soft H, only breath, at the start of “healthy” and “happy”: not silent, and not the rough Spanish J.

“And yet, they're just a computer company.”

Simon Sinek · 0:36 · Practise this line →

Y in “yet”, J in “just”: two different sounds in one line.

7. TH

Speakers from most of Spain already have the voiceless TH: it is the Z of “zapato” and the C of “cielo”. In Latin America those letters are said as S, so “think” can come out as “sink” or “tink”. The voiced TH of “this” is close to the soft D of Spanish “nada” or “todo”, a sound you already make between vowels; use it at the start of the word too. Listeners almost always understand either way, and the Lingua Franca Core treats TH as optional, so work on it once the features above are steady.

“We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.”

Sir Ken Robinson · 13:16 · Practise this line →

The voiceless TH of “think”, three times: not “tink” and not “sink”.

“The other thing that they had in common was this:”

Brené Brown · 9:43 · Practise this line →

The voiced TH of “the, other, that, they, this”, close to the soft D of Spanish “nada”.

Which words take which TH, with five more lines: TH sound practice.

8. Rhythm and stress

Spanish gives each syllable about the same time. English is stress-timed: the stressed syllables come at a fairly even beat and the ones between them shrink, most of them to a short “uh”, the schwa. The British Council’s note on syllable-timed languages says learners from such languages tend to give unstressed syllables equal stress. Every long English word also has one stressed syllable, and it is often not the one a similar Spanish word stresses: eCONomy against “economía”, PHOtograph against “fotografía”. In Sada, equal syllables show up as falling behind the speaker, the one part of rhythm Sada does measure.

“Not missiles, but microbes.”

Bill Gates · 0:59 · Practise this line →

Two strong words, “missiles” and “microbes”; “but” is short and quick between them.

“So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses”

Shawn Achor · 3:57 · Practise this line →

Four long words, four stress patterns: ecoNOMics, staTIStics, BUSiness, psyCHOLogy.

Rules that hold, with noun and verb pairs: word stress practice. Strong and weak words: sentence stress.

Ten minutes a day with Sada

1. Listen and repeat (2 minutes). Open one line from this page. In Repeat mode, listen twice, reading the caption, then say it after the speaker. Slow it to 0.75× if it is fast.
2. Shadow (3 minutes). Switch to Shadow mode and say the same line with the speaker, a moment behind, three or four times, until you keep up without reading.
3. Record and compare (2 minutes). Record a take, then open Compare and play your recording and the original. Pick one feature from this page and listen for that only. Review words and timing; Sada does not grade individual sounds.
4. Type it (2 minutes). Open the same line in Type it mode, for example “In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves.” as dictation: hear it, type it and check it word by word. A missed -ed or -s is never forgiven, so typing shows which endings you do not hear yet. More in English dictation practice.
5. Keep a daily line (1 minute). Open the 30-day path: five real lines a day, easy talks first, and a missed day is simply continued. How it works: the 30-day shadowing challenge.

Work on one feature a week, in the order of the table: vowels, then B and V, then endings, then Z, H and Y, then rhythm and stress. At the end of the week, record the same line again and play the two takes one after the other.

Keep going

For more real sentences from short to long: listen-and-repeat practice. For a wider plan, with word stress, -ed endings and the weak vowel: how to improve your English pronunciation. On how much accent to aim to change: how to reduce your accent in English. To see what Sada checks in every take: the pronunciation checker. The same kind of page for other groups of learners: English pronunciation for Indian speakers and English pronunciation for Arabic speakers.

Sources: the five Spanish vowels and their sounds from SpanishDict; B and V as one sound in Spanish from The Sounds of Spanish (Cambridge University Press); Z as a form of S before voiced consonants from Spanish phonology; syllable timing and its effect on learners from the British Council’s TeachingEnglish; which features matter most between speakers of different first languages from Lingua Franca Core; word pronunciations from the Cambridge Dictionary.