Guide To The Spanish Language
An introduction to Spanish without the grammar - A new and fresh perspective with some interesting items on
language and the similarities between Spanish and English
We need to learn to listen. You can learn a tremendous amount just by listening to people speaking the language. It surprises a lot of people when I
suggest that in addition to learning to “speak Spanish” they also have to learn
to “hear Spanish”, that they have to train their ear. When I first heard two
Spanish people talking it was more like white noise than a language. I then
made some progress and learned to put together a sentence and with great enthusiasm went out onto the street to try out my new skill. I asked a passer-by
in pretty clear Spanish, “Which way to the post office please” the response was more like the sound of a machine gun rattling off at 600 rounds a second
than anything I could possibly understand. I quickly learned the phrase “Mas despacio por favor” which translates as “more slowly please”, a very useful
phrase for the Spanish student. What I have learned is that the more I listen to people speaking Spanish the
more I can get to pick out key words, even when they speak at the speed of light. It seems that your ear gets “tuned in” to the language. Nowadays I am
pleased to be able to say, I do not have to ask them to speak more slowly, well not most of the time anyway. I can now understand more of what they
say because I have become attuned to the language. I have trained my ear by listening carefully and picking out recognizable words.
It is surprising how much you can make sense of what people are trying to say by picking out key
words, you don’t have to know and understand every single word to get the gist of what they are saying. It is true that for the untrained ear listening to
native Spanish speakers is daunting because it is difficult to distinguish individual words. The problem is that many words are spoken without having
a space between them. We also do this in English. In fact most fluent speakers will do it in whichever language they speak. In English we may say
something like “howyadoing?” which sounds like one word rather than three
words because not many people would include spaces between the words and speak it slowly to say “how are you doing?” maybe we would say
“that’smimum” instead of “that is my mum” in this case we have not only
omitted spaces between the words but have also ignored the letter “I” in the
word “is”.
In writing we have to use the apostrophe to communicate the omission of some letters. “That’s fine I’m here now”; In this sentence we have used the
apostrophe twice. Some speakers especially from the south of England would also omit the “h” sound in the word “here” and pronounce the word here as
“ear”. The foreign language student trying to understand English spoken fast
and without clear spaces between words just hears a long mumbled sound and will have trouble trying to identify the individual words.
The English speaker learning Spanish has the same problem, we hear something that
resembles a machine gun rather than coherent intelligent sentences. There is a technical name for what's happening by omitting the spaces between words
and some letters – the word for it is “ELISION” the dictionary definition tells us
this is a word for the omission of sounds as words are combined into phrases and sentences – an act or an instance of omitting something.
