The Spanish alphabet
Spanish has 27 letters — the Latin alphabet plus one of its own: ñ. Spelling is predictable in a way English never is: once you know the sounds, you can read a word out loud correctly the first time you see it. Don't sit down and memorize the alphabet today. Pick the letters up from real words like hola and mañana.
Vowels — five sounds, and only five
A, E, I, O, U each have one sound, always: ah, eh, ee, oh, oo. None of the long/short vowel guessing English makes you do. casa = KAH-sah, agua = AH-gwah, sí = see. Keep them short and clean — Spanish vowels never glide into a second sound the way the English 'oh' does.
Consonants that surprise English speakers
H is silent, every time: hola = OH-lah. J is a throaty h, the ch of loch: jugo (juice) = HOO-go. LL and Y are one and the same sound, an English y — llave (key) and yo (I) start alike. R at the start of a word and RR inside one are rolled hard: perro = PEH-rro. Ñ is the ny of canyon: mañana = ma-NYA-na, señor = se-NYOR. And in Mexican place names, x is that same throaty h: México = MEH-hee-ko, Oaxaca = wa-HA-ka.
Seseo — s, c and z are one sound
Across Latin America, c before e or i and z are pronounced exactly like s. cinco (five) starts with the same sound as sí. gracias is GRA-syas. casa (house) and caza (hunt) are perfect homophones. This makes listening easier, and it means the only work left is remembering which letter to write.
Stress and the accent mark
By default the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable when a word ends in a vowel, n or s, and on the last syllable when it ends in any other consonant. When a word breaks that default, an accent mark sits on the stressed vowel and tells you so: mamá = ma-MA, papá = pa-PA, México = MEH-hee-ko. The mark can also separate two words that would otherwise look identical: sí (yes) against si (if).
The upside-down marks
Spanish opens a question with ¿ and an exclamation with ¡, then closes with the ordinary ? and !. You see what kind of sentence is coming before you start reading it aloud: ¿Cómo estás? — ¡Hola!
