Working with so many students, I see the same challenges come up time and time again. While it's among the easiest languages to learn, several things are tough when you first learn Spanish that I hope to help you with today! We'll save verb conjugations and tenses (like subjunctive) for another post.

‘S’ vs ‘Z’ sound

Spanish is a phonetic language, which means that each consonant together with a vowel sounds unique and is less confusing. Good for Spanish learners!But one of the more challenging sounds when you first learn Spanish is the difference between ’S’ and ’Z’. Certain words such as ‘organiZaCioneS’ or ‘SenCillo’ have multiple ‘S’ and ‘Z’ sounds. (These words are pronounced as ‘or-ga-ni-THa-THi-O-NESS’ and ‘sen-THi-yo’).Knowing the phonetic alphabet helps a lot, but in my opinion, the most useful practice is these learning a few phonemes and practice reading them out loud.We will know that the letter 's' together with a vowel will sound as it is in English, some pretty straightforward examples:Señor - ‘sen – your’.Sandalia - ‘San – dull – ia’.With the Z sound, it's different. In English we vibrate the tip of our tongue when articulating this sound, like imitating the buzzing of a bee, while in Spanish (from Spain, not Latin America), the sound is milder, similar to the ’TH’ in the word ‘thank you’.When this sound is articulated, our upper and lower teeth are slightly separated, putting our tongue’s tip in between them… careful not to bite it!Once we know this, we go to the second pronunciation rule for today: ‘Z’ and ‘C’ sometimes sound in the same way! Depending on the vowel that accompanies the letter ‘C’, it will sound like a ‘TH’ or like a ‘K’. Have a look into the summary below to fully understand the idea:C + a/o/u = Ka / ko / ku. . Casa = KasaC + e/i = Th + e/i . Cero = THeroFind some words here were you can check what you have learnt by reading this article. Try to read them and associate each phoneme with the two rules given. You will find the solutions belowJose Nueces Cifra Cabeza Zancadilla Culebra Coincidencia SilencioEnjoy the practice and if you would like a free advice, never give up, a language is better understood when practicing continuously and reading as much as you can!Solutions:Jo – SeNu – e – THeSTHi – fraKa – be – THaTHan – Ka – di - iaKu – le – braKo – in – THi – den – THi – aSi – len – THi - o

Gender

Many words in Spanish are English cognates, making them easy to learn / remember. Example: Inspiration = inspiración.But it Spanish, words have a gender, masculine and feminine. This affects the structure of the sentence because depending on the gender of the noun / subject, the gender of all other words such as adjectives (words to describe the noun) and articles (really important words that in Spanish give a lot of information about the context) will follow the subject's gender.La casa es grande – The house is big (feminine).El caso es grande – The case / trial is important (masculine).As you can see, depending on the gender of the word ‘casa’, we could be talking about a house or about a trial in court… this is why it’s better to not to confuse genders! Also, the article ‘the’ changes from ‘La’ for feminine to ‘El’ to masculine.

Articles

This takes us to our next challenge area when you learn Spanish: articles.Let's start with the simplest articles:Una casaLa casa"A" house and "the" house.The first article, ‘a’, shows indetermination, unawareness of the context, while ‘the’ implies just the opposite: the noun we are talking about is identified, known. Indeterminado: Singular Plural A circus
A snake Un circo
Una serpiente Unos circos
Unas serpientes Determinado: The car
The apple El coche
La manzana Unas coches
Unas manzanasAs you can see, when we change the number of the article, singular to plural or vice versa, the number of the noun changes also, being ‘coche’ in singular and ‘coches’ in pluralAs a proposal, I would like you to spot the differences of the meaning in the next sentences:El coche es de Juan.Un coche es de Juan.See you in class!