• E would be the central character of the english language.

I’m making a program to help my amada learn how to listen to and pronounce Spanish syllables. It’s fairly straight forward to put together the rules set for Spanish’s phonetic constructions; disregarding grammar and aesthetic academic pursuits, of course. I’m only basing it on the knowledge of the language I’m acquainted with, which is not a scholar’s – Yet, in contrast to her knowledge base, is comparatively infinite (larger than she would care to know or think possible at the moment). Fortunately for her, my vocabulary is that of a native speaker.

Based on a simple matching schematic, here are some of the rules, that excluding Proper Nouns, which span ALL languages (McCarthy for example) seem to apply to most of spanish

• Only 2 letters, ‘r’ and ‘l’ are ever repeated next to each other.
• The letters ‘r’ and ‘l’ also are the only letters used in a 3 letter syllable where 2 consonants are next to each other, e.g. “bra”, “bla”
• ‘H’ is always silent unless preceded by only two letters {’c', and ’s’}
• Most dual letter combinations in Spanish form phonemes.
  • There are some redundant graphenes (unique sounds from letter combinations that form a phoneme)
    • Anyone that starts with ‘w’, ‘x’, ‘q’ are found from other graphemes.
    • Anything with ‘h’ is just like the sound of the single vowel.
• There are special cases for syllable brakeup. 
• In words, there are no single consonant syllables. except for y = “and” and is phonetically equal to “i”
• Syllables are broken up in groups of 2 or 3 letters… any larger are extremely uncommon
• R has the most special consideration for placement within a word. sounding differently if starting a word than if in the middle of it
• etc.

I decided to make the program have a bottom up approach because I would like her to learn like a kid learns to read spanish. I cant afford Berlitz either… There are tricks that people should practice in order to acquire a more natural accent. Kids are taught to say the vowels over and over with a little limerick “a, e, i, o, u, mas sabe el burro que tu”. Additionally, rolling the tongue is actually done in english quite commonly. The common misconception is that every ‘r’ sounds like a woodpecker pecking away; machine gun like. the majority of the ‘r’s use can be summed up in the way the ‘t’ is pronounced in english when the following phrase is said quickly, “Cut away”. The machine gun?… I haven’t come up with an analogue for that one – YET!

Another observation:

Sequoia is a beautiful word in spanish and english. It sounds exactly the same in both languages, especially when pronounced carefully. The cool thing about that word, it has every vowel… and in case english speaking people forget how a vowel is supposed to sound ALWAYS in spanish, saying “sequoia” should point them in the right direction.

I’ll have a demo of the word “banana” pretty soon. Ba-ná-na using pitch shifting to create the correct enunciation of the middle “na” phoneme.

More later…