Exactly My thoughs

Thank you so much!

Completely agree with this!

@@brycenichols7189 Thank you!

This was super informative as someone learning Spanish. I really appreciate the bit about how you typically imitate stereotypical English accent in a written form. It helps me see how things like a super anglicized "amigo" actually sounds like "amigouugh" or "amigowh" or something similar, which helps reinforce to me how you guys hear syllables more straightforward and consistently. It feels like this helps me feel out the difference in being in the "espanish mode" with my mouth and throat, which sets me up to naturally pronounce things more like a native speaker without having to stress about every individual sound so much. Thanks for sharing.

@@GSPV33 You're welcome, I'm very happy that you find my comment useful. :) I've been studing English for over ten years and I still have a lot to learn. Pronunciation is the most difficult part for me. I recommend you a KZfaq Channel called "Linguriosa", she's a linguist Spaniard who makes videos about Spanish curiosities. She speaks very clearly so her channel is great to practice listening skills for learners. She has a video about the "E" sound behind the S called "¿Por qué los hablantes de español no pueden pronunciar esto del inglés?" If I don't remember wrong. Her channel is great for Spanish students and Spanish native speakers as well. Her videos are very dinamic and you always learn something.

I'm so glad you found this helpful. I have considered starting a channel for people learning English. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, because it seems like a lot of work. I spent 6 years studying Spanish in undergrad and graduate programs, and I really know Spanish. I don't know English as well, and I'd have to spend considerable time studying it so my videos were accurate.

When you list the words with all of the accents on the Spanish vowels, that is what he is saying we SHOULD do in this video, correct? I am thinking I should focus on pronouncing the vowels more than the consonants to improve my accent. Is that what you are saying in this post? Or are you saying that your friend who is a native Spanish speaker said this sounded incorrect?

@@dionne3311 Yes and no. In Spanish, one and only one syllable in each word will be stressed. Pronouncing each "a" as if it had an accent mark is incorrect. _But_ for native English speakers, it may be difficult to use the correct vowel sound if you are saying the vowel unstressed. An example, for the English word "afar", the "a"s are pronounced differently. The second "a" has the stress, but it's also pronounced with a different vowel sound. According to Wiktionary, with IPA notation it's written as either /ʌˈfaɹ/ or /əˈfɑː/. I don't have the proper vocabulary for linguistic concepts to properly describe this, but in Spanish the quality of "a" will always be the same. "ʌ" is different to "a" (or "ə" is different to "ɑ"). In English you could have a stressed "ʌ" and an unstressed "a", or you could have a stressed "a" and an unstressed "ʌ" (such as the word "afar"). In Spanish, it will always be "a", even if it's unstressed. I didn't even realize I was changing the vowel sound when I attempted to pronounce "a" unstressed. For me, pronouncing words in a manner such as "trábájábá" helped me understand what I was doing wrong. I was able to pronounce all vowels as "a" instead of "ʌ". But it caused a different problem. I was pronouncing unstressed syllables as stressed. I'll use English pronunciation to describe my problem for the word "amable". Before this exercise I was pronouncing it as "uh MAH blay" (the "uh" is the incorrect vowel but the correct stress). When I was working on my pronunciation it sounded like "AH MAH blay" (stress on "AH" is incorrect, but the vowel sound is correct). It should sound like "ah MAH blay". After focusing on this and practicing this specifically, I was able to improve my pronunciation. Does this make sense?

My very next video will discuss that topic. Thank you for the kind words!

I'm so glad you've found my material useful.

I have some appreciation for how different European languages are from your native language, because I took a couple years of Mandarin when I was in college. I find it very interesting to consider that, from the point of view of a Chinese speaker, English and Spanish have significant similarities. From the point of view of an English speaker, Spanish and English are very different, and the differences are maddening. But, of course, they are similar in deep and important ways, which would be noticeable from the perspective of someone whose native language was quite different.

This may be very basic and not something you’d be interested in but I still figured I’d ask-can you do a video about Si=if and Sí=yes. I simply can not hear any difference in the stress of the pronunciation, even when I ask native Spanish speakers they can’t really explain it well the stress sound.

@@furiogiunta556 I'm not answering for the host of this channel and I look forward to his response (and the responses of native Spanish speakers), but to me as a native English speaker the pronunciation of both words is the same. The difference in spelling is only to distinguish that one is used as an affirmative (yes) and the other as a conjunction (if).

​@@tenminutespanish cooool. From my point of view, the pronunciation is kind of similar to my other mother tongue besides mandarin, which is called Wu Chinese (to be specific, Shanghai Dialect). Almost all spanish phonemes can be found in Wu (excluding the r, rr and the d inside of a word). But In Wu, we differentiate 't' and 'd' according to the pitch of a word instead of themselves. As a result, I couldn't distinguish 't' and 'd' in spanish though i can make these two sounds. That was super confusing to me. Thanks to your videos on 't' and 'd', 'p' and 'b', 'c' and 'g'. Though some phonemes are the same (or at least super similar), the way we perceive them are different across Chinese and European languages

I'm so happy you liked the video.

Great comment! Thanks.

Glad you found it helpful. Virtually 100% of English speakers do this.

Thank you! Glad you liked the video. But this isn't simplified! This is advanced stuff. This is graduate level comparative phonology.

@@tenminutespanish Well that is an achievement then since it seems easy to grok.

@@matthewfuller9760 Thank you!

Thank you! I'm so glad to hear that you found this useful. And as a musician I hope you found the Easter egg reference to jazz music amusing.

I'm glad you liked the video!

It's definitely different in various dialects of English.

Good job identifying areas of improvement. ALL English speakers do this. It's one of the core aspects of the English speaker foreign accent in Spanish.

I don't expect anything of you. I communicate information, and you can do with it what you want.

[ə] no existe en español. Así que, no es un alófono de ninguna vocal en español.

I'm really happy you like my videos. I'll put out a call for submissions in six months or so. You can submit a recording of your speech for analysis then.

@@tenminutespanish I hope you don't mind that I showed one of your video in my intermediate Spanish classes today. Your explanations are so concise and helpful. Perfect 10. Now that I have heard my vowel reduction in the imperfect tense I am going to fix it before 6 months. 👍

@@georgeadams8719 I'm very flattered. I hope your class liked the video. I'm very happy you like my channel.

That's because Portuguese has vowel reduction. Of course it's different than English (it very rarely reduces all the way to /ə/) and it varies between dialects.

As @vytah already stated, it varies, but as a native Portuguese speaker I would say Brazilian dialects never reduce vowels, while in European Portuguese, African and Asian dialects the reduction is the norm.