Spanish Alphabet

Spanish Alphabet song

Learn the Spanish Alphabet, the letters, proper pronunciation plus listen to the alphabet song and you will be well on your way to learning Spanish.

The best way to learn Spanish for beginners is to learn the alphabet.  Not only that, but it a good way to learn proper Spanish pronunciation. 

 

If you are a native English speaker, then you will find it a little easier as the letters of the alphabet, a total of 30, are not much different from those in the English alphabet consisting of 26 letters. 

FACTOID: Technically, according to the Real Academia Española, the rr is no longer considered a letter, and therefore in most cases the Spanish alphabet only has 29 letters.

But that is just technically speaking. We are more concerned here about learning proper Spanish pronunciation, not the definition of the alphabet right?

These letters actually make it easier, due to the fact that words are pronounced phonetically, adding these extra letters only make it easier to distinguish once you know what they are and how to properly pronounce them.

There are four extra letters:

• Ch (che)
• Ll (ehl-yeh or eh-yeh)
• ñ (eh-nyeh)
• and rr (eh-rreh)

These extra letters can somewhat confuse those who are new to the language. That is why I find it so important to start with the basics and then just move on from there, because if you can pronounce the alphabet correctly, then you can pronounce almost any word in Spanish correctly.

The best way would be to hear the letters pronounced for you, so you can repeat them for yourself for quicker learning. Practice sounding out the letters always helps to learn them faster too. There are many pieces of software out there to do that, and it is important to choose the one that works best for you. I have found that Rocket Spanish is extremely helpful as it has interactive lessons that allow you to easily memorize words, see them and hear them.

Spanish vowels are the same as the English, and of course are pronounced differently, but in some words the vowels have accent marks on them, and are pronounced slightly differently than those without the accent. The use of Spanish accent marks is discussed more here...