Feb
29
Spanish pronunciation 101
Podcast: Download
Today’s podcast is an introduction to a series of podcasts I plan to do with Martin Ventola, a Spanish teacher from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Martin has studied English phonetics, so that background, combined with his experience teaching Spanish to extranjeros in Buenos Aires, makes him the ideal guide for those of us who want to improve our Spanish pronunciation.
In this introductory episode, Martin talks about some of the differences between English and Spanish pronunciation, introduces us to the “base of articulación” and tells us the reason why we could all learn something by watching the performance of U.S. actor Jack Black in the movie Nacho Libre. Yeah, no kidding! 
Martin and I are going to keep these podcasts short but packed with practical information. Whenever possible, Martin will include some simple exercises we can do on our own to get rid of or at least minimize our gringo accents.
Please leave your comments and suggestions and tell us what you think. Also, be sure to check out Martin’s blog (spanishpronunciation101.com) for more information on this topic.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
[...] here for more [...]
March 2nd, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I’m excited to hear more from Martin. And I absolutely love it that he suggested using Jack Black in Nacho Libre as an example of good Spanish pronunciation. I told my husband about Martin’s advice and he was overjoyed as he loves Jack Black, and any excuse he can find to watch the movie again, he’ll take.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Excellent start to what promises to be a fantastic series. Looking forward to the next installment.
March 7th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Thanks, Molly and Graham! I’ve currently got four episodes in the hopper but they need to be edited. And Martin and I are mapping out another additional four episodes after that. The plan is to have about 8 episodes in total focusing on some specific aspect of Spanish pronunciation. It will probably take a few months to publish the entire series since I want these particular episodes to be a supplement, not a replacement, to the regular podcast.
March 15th, 2008 at 9:07 am
[...] exist in Spanish Standard Podcast: Play | Download In the first full episode of the Spanish Pronunciation 101 series, our teacher Martín Ventola talks about English consonants sounds that don’t exist in [...]
April 4th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
[...] don’t really exist in Spanish. And if you want to be sure to catch all future episodes of the Spanish Pronuniciation 101 series, please subscribe to the RSS feed. (This feed is different from the iTunes [...]
July 16th, 2008 at 12:13 am
[...] Intro to Spanish pronunciation [...]