When pronouncing English vowels your mouth is generally more relaxed because its articulation point is usually closer to the centre of your mouth.Ī Vietnamese friend used to have muscle pain in her mouth after speaking Spanish for a while. Pronouncing Spanish requires lots of tension and lots of training. Your mouth is tenser when pronouncing Spanish vowelsĪbove all when pronouncing rounded vowels (o, u). In approximately, half the time compared to an English vowel (180 to 260 milliseconds in English vs 160 milliseconds in Spanish). So the fourth difference between Spanish and English vowels is that Spanish vowels are pronounced faster. In Spanish, the vowels are always short, as in pop. The English language has long and short vowels. That’s why we normally have such a terrible accent when we speak in each other’s language. Even /i/ and /u/ sounds are different, although sometimes they may sound similar. None of the Spanish vowels sounds the same as in English. In the image below, you can see the articulation point of Spanish vowels (blue) and English vowels (very light orange). Here you can see 4 common pronunciation errors and how to avoid them.

You may think that some of the Spanish vowels sound the same as in English but actually, they aren’t.

Spanish vowels sound different from English vowels There’s only one sound for each vowel: the letter A sounds /a/ and the letter O sounds /o/. You only need to learn these 5 vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u). (In some regions, like in Murcia, they have more than 5 vowel sounds, but these 5 are common to all the Spanish dialects). Hit the play button and you’ll see the biggest difference between English and Spanish vowels (note that Ricky’s accent isn’t a typical Spaniard accent at all).Įnglish has at least 11 vowel sounds -and even more, depending on the dialect- while Spanish has only 5. This is a very common mistake when pronouncing Spanish vowels. We don’t have the schwa sound, that you probably use when you speak Spanish. Have you noticed how strong is the Spanish accent when we speak English? This means that we tend to vocalize, even when we speak in another language. In Spanish, the most important part of a word are the vowels (vocalic language), while in English, consonants are more important (consonantal language). Vowels are the most important part of the word These are the main differences between English and Spanish vowels: 1. Understanding the difference between Spanish and English vowels is vital to know how to produce the Spanish vowel sounds correctly and reduce your accent since Spanish is a vocalic language.

What are the vowels in english