In this course, we want to avoid as much jargon as possible, and make things as simple as we can. However, one technical aspect that we can’t avoid is something called the phoneme.

What is a phoneme?

Through this course, you’ll see lots of symbols enclosed in back slashes (for example, /e/). These symbols represent sounds. They could be consonant or vowel sounds, and they are used to give us an accurate description of how to pronounce a word. Why?

Written language doesn’t help pronunciation

When we write a word, we are using its spelling. Usually (and especially in Spanish, less so in English) this helps us to pronounce the word, but often literally reading the spelling will lead to poor or incorrect pronunciation, and doesn’t allow for lots of the extra sounds and details which make up a great Spanish accent. Letters can be pronounced in more than one way, and different letter and word combinations all have an impact on the pronunciation, which can’t be reflected in the spelling.

That’s why we’re going to use phonemic symbols, as they give us a consistent way of describing the way words sound. Some of these can be strange symbols (for example, /ʎ/), and others are a little confusing (the symbol /j/ represents the “y” sound in “yoghurt”, for example).

When you see a letter or a symbol in “/” (for example /e/), that’s a phoneme, and represents a sound. When you see a letter in quotation marks (for example “e”), we’re referring to letters.

But don’t worry, we’ll go slow! Everything will be accompanied by audio, and you’ll get plenty of opportunities to review your knowledge of phonemes as we go through the course.

Ready to start?