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How to pronounce Spanish words, language rules...

I live in Spain and I've never once heard somebody say "seJir"

I think Ben is going to try to figure it out. Most sound files are using the jota for G when it shouldn't be used. I have no idea from what planet the speaker is.

COuld you possibly make a comment on one of the items themselves - that way I can easily track it down and find out who is adding the audio. Thanks!

Ben

Which flashcards are you talking about? There are lots of different voices on memrise. The Exito de Venta speaker is definitely from South America. I really wouldn't worry like this, no one will hear your accent as being anything other than that of an English speaker for a long time.

Ben I added comments to Seguir and El gobierno.

Rabbit you would be surprised, My gf from Mexico says sometimes I speak Spanish with a French accent and sometimes with an accent from Spain :0) Good luck to me LOL.

I finally found what you were talking about! http://www.memrise.com/item/314622/seguir-to-follow-to-pursue-to-continue/

All of the pronunciations sound correct to me. But yeah, it would be cool if they had little flags beside them or something like that. (Although sometimes these things aren't even regional. Some Spanish people don't roll their Rs, it doesn't necessary have to do with where they're from, a lot of English speaking people don't pronounce the "th" again, it can be regional, but not always.)

The middle one I don't know, the 3ed one sounds Spain Spanish to me.

It's not really the same as an English G in any case, it's hard but it's not as hard.

I refer to a pronunciation I found online: Pronounce G as in Dog If G comes before the letters e or i, the sound is the same as that of the Spanish J Source: http://spanish.about.com/od/spanishpronunciation/Learn_Spanish_Pronunciation.htm

If I listen to http://www.memrise.com/item/9730/el-gobierno/ I hear 'el Robierno' If I listen to http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/gobierno (click on video translation) I hear 'el Gobierno' and this site is purely from Spain.

I know American Spanish is 'el Gobierno' so I'm just wondering where the "Robierno" comes from and if it's a good thing to teach that to users.

W00t? pronounce D as in dog? That page is for beginners to get a rough estimate by using sounds from their own language, the Spanish G doesn't exist in English, nor does the D or the B or a lot of the other consonants. You can't tell a native speaker they are wrong because they don't pronounce the G like the G in an English word.

The man in that video on SpanishDict was American, None of the people who work for Spanish Dict are native speakers, except for that one man who does half of the video definitions, and he was only hired to do those videos.

SpanishDict is mostly American Spanish, but as it's only for beginners it doesn't really make a difference.

Here he is again: http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/seguir you'll notice that even though he's South American it is not exactly the G in dog.

http://www.memrise.com/item/9730/el-gobierno/ this is perfect. I live in Spain, my boyfriend is Colombian, I'm sorry but this is how people talk.

I trust native speakers to pronounce words in their own language before I trust a book that tries to approximate sounds from a Germanic language into a Romantic one in order to help beginners to be understood.

Well Rabbit, thank you very much for your advices. I see you are an expert looking at your profile and seeing you know so many people at SpanishDict.com...hey maybe even more than I do (or did). I think we will leave it at that. Thanks again for your input.

?

I don't understand your last post.

Anyway I think it would be a good idea to have a little flag with people's nationality or dialect on their profiles that automatically gets put next to sound recordings when we upload them. Or, to keep the design from getting messy, the flag could pop up when you moved the cursor over the play recording icon.

I think the suggestion that one accent is inferior to another and should therefore be removed is unreasonable.

Another example of different pronunciation is the C.

In most of Spain, the c before an e or an i is pronounced much like the "th" in "thin" or "think."

In nearly all of Latin America, the c also has the "s" sound when it comes before an e or an i.

In my experience most people here pronounce it like an S. But it's true, in standard Peninsular Spanish it's a th. Again, this is all very good for people to know, but why do you think Spanish people shouldn't be allowed to upload pronunciations? Would you also ban British people from uploading English pronunciation in favour of the accents of the Americas? I don't see why we can't have international native speaker accents :)

Please read my original post. It is made solely to warn beginners of linguistics differences not to prohibit the upload of accented sound files. It does so happens thought that some of those files are way out of the norms and it might be more beneficial to all if they were replaced by a more standard pronunciation.

Would you really want to learn English with a Scottish accent?

If I could sound like Sean Connery, I just might want to. Seriously, I do get your point. Maybe Ben and the wonderful people at memrise could create some tagging system that could identify the regional accent associated with the audio clicks. That way, if a person wants to focus on the peninsular Spanish accent as opposed to the Mexican accent or any other accent for that matter, they could.

Haha, well now, San Connery...that's different. To me the only real James Bond that ever existed :0)

Excellent idea, the tagging would be great, quite a project though. So if not for the immediate I am pretty sure the Memrise team will keep this feature in mind. I look forward to it.

Okay. Now you think I shouldn't do my job because I have a celtic accent. I'll just give up teaching English because it can only be done by Americans. Thanks for the heads up. What a pity I wasted almost 5 years of my life teaching people while speaking with my inferior non-standard accent.

I think that replacing "non-standard accents" with "standard ones" (Which in your mind means Mexican, right?) is the same as prohibiting people to upload sound files, why would they do it if it was going to be "replaced"?

I think you'll see that I already suggested tagging the nationality of the uploads.

I don't think the tagging would be too difficult, I think it would be a simple drop down menu of all the countries in the world when you signed up, saying which one you were from. Then the flag of that country would appear beside all the sound files you uploading. Or the drop down menu could be placed next to the "native language" drop down menu, to show that you spoke one of the dialects from that particular country.

In the meantime, let's not limit the amount of information available to learners.

I didn't mean to imply that one accent is inferior to another accent or that we should restrict content. However, I would sound pretty funny if I switched between a British accent, an Australian accent, a British Indian accent, and an American accent in the same sentence. For those of us who are closer to Latin American countries, it makes sense to learn a Latin American Spanish accent. For those on the other side of the ocean, it might make more sense to learn the peninsular Spanish accent. The only reason I mentioned Mexican was because I was hungry for Mexican food. If I had been craving steak with chimichurri, I would have probably written Argentinian instead of Mexican. Or, for that matter, if I had been craving Cuban black beans with arroz con pollo, I would have written Cuban instead of Mexican. Now the more important question is, What am I going to have for dinner tonight? I'm thinking Chinese, which by the way, would be a horrible accent to use when speaking Spanish.

Haha, well said jenniferhunter. I am glad to see that SOME of us have a great sense of humor and SOME other were just born and live in a permanent state of PMS ;0) You didn't mention French food and accent...I'm offended (NOT)!

I think that it is clear that we need to get the audio tagging going so that people can choose the audio that they want to hear. It shouldn't be hard, and it would be very cool.

The question of limiting who can upload audio is a tricky one: at the moment we say that it should be "native speakers" of any dialect. But I have to confess that I have in the past asked a native English speaker from Singapore not to upload their audio to the site as English examples: they were a "native speaker", but the accent was so strong that it didn't sound it to me.

Which actually was probably wrong of me in some sense, because there are doubtless many people (perhaps Malaysians) who want to learn English as spoken in Singapore and would have enjoyed having the authentic accent. Once the tagging system is up, we could handle that, but for the moment it would be too confusing (well that was my subjective and arguably somewhat arbitrary jugement).

Interestingly Chinese seems even more confusing to get the accents right for than other languages: I have had Chinese people swear blind to me that some bits of audio on the site were not recorded by native speakers - when in fact I recorded them and know that they were not only native speakers, but ones from an area with a fairly standard accent. And then conversely, even as a real beginner speaking Chinese you will sometimes get mistaken on the telephone for a native speaker and then after a bit they will say "oh? You're not chinese! Ha, I thought you were Chinese!" which would NEVER happen if I tried to speak to, say, a French person on the phone. They would know from the first word I uttered that I was English. It seems that, unlike with European languages where we can tell accents very clearly, in Chinese it is much harder and less clear cut. The tones, of course, are crystal clear to a Chinese ear.

But anyway, my hope is that until we get the tagging sorted, the mix of accents on the site can give a sense of the richness in the variety of the languages, and stimulate some good discussions as well - as it seems to have done!

So thank you all very much for your input, and I will now get on with trying to bring the audio tagging to reality,

Thanks

Ben

Ps, I am going to be having Chinese for lunch. Again.

Jenifer, I know that you didn't imply anything, I was talking to stretchie when I said that. You were clearly joking, and in an intelligent way which didn't attempt to put other people below you because of their nationality or gender.

Here in Spain every village seems to have their own accent, and some people can even tell you what village you are from based on your accent. I guess if you spread that over a country as big as China... Apparently it used to be like that with English in the past, I think it was in the introduction to Pigmalion that there was a linguist who could tell you what street in London you were from after hearing you speak a few words. We all watch a lot of TV now!

So I live in Spain now but all of the beginners resources I used were south American, specifically Argentinian. It was never a problem, there were a few words I got corrected on: frutilla > fresa, frigorífico > nevera, manejar > conducir but what was that, 3 seconds out of my life I'll never see again?

I think the key is the information, I knew I was learning the Argentinian version and I read up on the differences. Pronunciation of "ll" etc. Now I usually say "ll" the Colombian way just because the Spanish way is too hard, the beginners courses tell you it's like the "y" in "yet" but it's not, I can't make the sound at all.

If it winds up too complicated to tag the sounds, people could start uploading saying the name of their accent fist in the recording: "Chile. llevanTAte" "España: lleVANtate"