Lesson 1 — ¿Cómo te llamas?

1. Dialogue

2. Hello

Notes

• Hasta means "until"; luego means "then"; you can translate it as "see you later" or "see you soon". In the same vein, hasta mañana means "see you tomorrow".
• Note the upside-down exclamation (¡) and question marks (¿).

Examples

• ¡Buenos días, clase!

  Good morning, class!

• Hola, ¿Cómo están hoy?

  Hello, how are you today?

• Adiós, ¡hasta luego!

  Goodbye, see you later!

2.1. Exercise

Hello!

What greeting would you use...(click on the arrow for solution.)

Please note that "día" is a masculine word, thus we say Buenos días. "Tarde" and "Noches" are feminine words and so we use Buenas before them.

3. What's Your Name

To ask someone else's name in Spanish, use cómo, then one of the phrases in the table below (¿Cómo te llamas? is "What's your name?" (literally How do you call yourself?).

In Spanish, to say your name, you use the reflexive verb llamarse, which means literally to call oneself (Me llamo Robert is "I call myself Robert) meaning "My name is Robert".

Notes

• "Os llamáis" is only used in Spain. In Latin America, "Se llaman" is used for both the second and third plural persons.

Examples

• Me llamo Chris

  My name is Chris (I call myself Chris.)

• Se llaman Peter y Robert

  They're called Peter and Robert. (They call themselves Peter and Robert.)

• ¿Cómo te llamas?

  What's your name? (What do you call yourself?)

• ¿Cómo se llama?

  What's his/her name? (What does he/she call him/herself?)

3.1. Exercise

Translate the following Spanish sentences into English:

4. Simple Vocabulary

Simple Vocabulary

Notes

For some of the words above, there are two options. The one ending in "o" is for males, and the one ending in "a" is for females. It's all to do with agreement, which is covered in future chapters.

Also, there are cultural differences in how people respond to "How are you?". In the U.S., we might answer "Mal" if we have a headache, or we're having a bad hair day. In Spanish-speaking cultures, "mal" would be used if a family member were very ill, or somebody lost their job. Similarly, "Fatal" in the U.S. might mean a ruined manicure or a fight with one´s girlfriend, but would be reserved more for things like losing one's home in a Spanish-speaking country.

Expressing "you are welcome" is more formal in Costa Rica than in other countries. Con mucho gusto is formal. Gusto is less formal. De nada, in some areas is considered slightly insulting and should not be used.

Examples

• Roberto: Hola, Rosa. ¿Qué tal?

  Hello, Rose. How are you?

• Rosa: Muy bien, gracias. ¿Y tú, Roberto?

  Very well, thanks. And you, Robert?

• Roberto: Bien también. ¡Hasta luego!

  I'm good too. See you later!

4.1. How are you?

Rank the following words from one to five (one being the best, five being the worst).

5. The Spanish Alphabet

The Spanish Alphabet

Here is the traditional Spanish alphabet. The current Spanish alphabet is made up of the letters with numbers above them, and is also sorted in that order. Please read the notes and sections below. (Blue and red letters are a part of the normal English alphabet).

Consonants

Although the above will help you understand, proper pronunciation of Spanish consonants is a bit more complicated:

Most of the consonants are pronounced as they are in American English with these exceptions:

• b like the English b at the start of a word and after m or n, (IPA: /b/). Elsewhere, especially between vowels, it is softer, often like a blend between English v and b. (IPA: /β/)
• c before i and e like English th in "think" (in Latin America it is like English s) (European IPA: /θ/; Latin American IPA: /s/)
• c before a, o, u and other consonants, like English k (IPA: /k/)

• The same sound for e and i is written like que and qui, where the u is silent (IPA: /ke/ and /ki/).

• ch like ch in “cheese” (IPA: /tʃ/)
• d at the start of a word and after n, like English d in "under" (IPA: /d/)
• d between vowels (even if these vowels belong to different words) similar to English th in "mother" (IPA: /ð/); at the end of words like "universidad" you may hear a similar sound, too.
• g before e or i like the Dutch g (IPA: /x/)
• g before a, o, u, like g in “get” (IPA: /g/)

• The same sound for e and i is written like gue and gui, where the u is silent (IPA: /ge/ and /gi/). If the word needs the u to be pronounced, you write it with a diaeresis e.g. pingüino, lengüeta.

• h is always silent (except in the digraph ch)
• j like the h in hotel, or like the Scottish pronunciation of ch in "loch" (IPA: /h/ or /x/)
• ll is pronounced like gli in Italian "famiglia," or as English y in “yes” (IPA: /ʎ/)
• ñ like nio in “onion” (or gn in French cognac) (IPA: /ɲ/)
• q like the English k; occurs only before ue or ui (IPA: /k/)
• r at the beginning of a word; after l, n, or s; or when doubled (rr), it is pronounced as a full trill (IPA: /r/), elsewhere it is a single-tap trill (IPA: /ɾ/)
• v is pronounced like b, there is no distinction whatsoever between B and V. (IPA: /b/)
• x is pronounced much like an English x, except a little more softly, and often more like gs. (IPA: /ks/)
• z like the English th (in Latin America, like the English s) (European IPA: /θ/; Latin American IPA: /s/)

Vowels

The pronunciation of vowels is as follows:

• a [a] "La Mano" as in "Kahn" (ah)
• e [e] "Mente" as in "hen" (eh)
• i [i] "Sin" as the ea in "lean" (e)
• o [o] "Como" as in "more" (without the following 'r')
• u [u] "Lunes" as in "toon" or "loom" (oo)

The "u" is always silent after a g or a q (as in "qué" pronounced keh).

Spanish also uses the ¨ (diaeresis) diacritic mark over the vowel u to indicate that it is pronounced separately in places where it would normally be silent. For example, in words such as vergüenza ("shame") or pingüino ("penguin"), the u is pronounced as in the English "w" and so forms a diphthong with the following vowel: [we] and [wi] respectively. It is also used to preserve sound in stem changes and in commands: averiguar (to research) - averigüemos (let's research).

The y [ʝ] "Reyes" is similar to the y of "yet", but more voiced (in some parts of Latin America it is pronounced as s in "vision" [ʒ] or sh in "flash" [ʃ]) At the end of a word or when it means "and" ("y") it is pronounced like i.

Acute accents

Spanish uses the ´ (Acute) diacritic mark over vowels to indicate a vocal stress on a word that would normally be stressed on another syllable; Stress is contrastive. For example, the word ánimo is normally stressed on a, meaning "mood, spirit." While animo is stressed on ni meaning "I cheer." And animó is stressed on mó meaning "he cheered."

Additionally the acute mark is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs. It's used in various question word or relative pronoun pairs such as cómo (how?) & como (as), dónde (where?) & donde (where), and some other words such as tú (you) & tu (your), él (he/him) & el (the).

6. Pronunciation

Letter-sound correspondences in Spanish

The table below presents letter-sound correspondences in the order of the traditional Spanish alphabet.

One letter, one sound

Pronouncing Spanish based on the written word is much simpler than pronouncing English based on written English. Each vowel represents only one sound. With some exceptions (such as w and x), each consonant also represents one sound. Many consonants sound very similar to their English counterparts.

As the table indicates, the pronunciation of some consonants (such as b) does vary with the position of the consonant in the word, whether it is between vowels or not, etc. This is entirely predictable, so it doesn't really represent a breaking of the "one letter, one sound" rule.

The University of Iowa has a very visual and detailed explanation of the Spanish pronunciation.

Here is another page with links to the audio files of the letters.

Local pronunciation differences

Word stress

In Spanish there are two levels of stress when pronouncing a syllable: stressed and unstressed. To illustrate: in the English word "thinking", "think" is pronounced with stronger stress than "ing". If both syllables are pronounced with the same stress, it sounds like "thin king".

With one category of exceptions (-mente adverbs), all Spanish words have one stressed syllable. If a word has an accent mark (´; explicit accent), the syllable with the accent mark is stressed and the other syllables are unstressed. If a word has no accent mark (implicit accent), the stressed syllable is predictable by rule (see below). If you don't put the stress on the correct syllable, the other person may have trouble understanding you. For example: esta, which has an implicit accent in the letter e, means "this (feminine)"; and está, which has an explicit accent in the letter a, means "is." Inglés means "English," but ingles means "groins."

Adverbs ending in -mente are stressed in two places: on the syllable where the accent falls in the adjectival root and on the men of -mente. For example: estúpido → estúpidamente.

The vowel of an unstressed syllable should be pronounced with its true value, as shown in the table above. Don't reduce unstressed vowels to neutral schwa sounds, as occurs in English.

Rules for pronouncing the implicit accent

There are only the following rules for pronouncing the implicit accent. The stressed syllable is in bold letters:

• If a word ends with a vowel or with n or s , the next-to-last syllable is stressed.
  Examples:
  • cara (ca-ra) (face)
  • mano (ma-no) (hand)
  • amarillo (a-ma-ri-llo) (yellow)
  • hablan (ha-blan) (they speak)
  • martes (mar-tes) (Tuesday)

• If a word ends with a consonant other than n or s, the last syllable is stressed.
  Examples:
  • farol (fa-rol) (street lamp)
  • azul (a-zul) (blue)
  • español (es-pa-ñol) (Spanish)
  • salvador (sal-va-dor) (savior).

• A syllable usually contains exactly one vowel. If there are two adjacent vowels, they count as two distinct syllables if both are one of a,e and o. If, however, at least one of them is i or u, they count as only one syllable. If, according to the two rules above, that syllable is stressed, the first of the two vowels is stressed if it is one of a, e and o, while the second vowel is stressed if the first one is one of i and u.
  Examples:
  • correo (co-rre-o) (mail)
  • hacia (ha-cia) (in the direction of)
  • fui (fu-i) (I was) (Note that this word has only one syllable.)

Any exception to these rules is marked by writing an acute accent (máximo, paréntesis, útil, acción). In those exceptions, the stressed syllable is the one where the acute accent (called tilde in Spanish) appears.

The diaeresis ( ¨ ) - a mark placed over a vowel to indicate that it is sounded in a separate syllable, as in naïve.

In the clusters gue and gui, the u is not pronounced; it serves simply to give the g a hard-g sound, like in the English word gut (gue → [ge]; gui → [gi]).

However, if the u has a the diaeresis mark (¨), it is pronounced like an English w (güe → [gwe]; güi → [gwi]). This mark is rather rare.

Examples:

• pedigüeño = beggar
• agüéis (2nd person plural, present subjunctive of the verb aguar). Here, the diaeresis preserves the u (or [w]) sound in all the verb tenses of aguar.
• argüir (to deduce)
• pingüino = penguin

7. How Do You Spell That?

Examples

• Roberto: Buenos días. Me llamo Roberto. ¿Cómo te llamas?

  Good day. My name is Robert. What's your name?

• Benjamín: Hola. Me llamo Benjamín. ¿Cómo se escribe Roberto?

  Hello. I'm Benjamin. How do you spell Robert?

• Roberto: Se escribe R (de Rioja); O (de Orangután); B (de Barcelona); E (de España); R (de Rioja); T (de Tigre); O (de Orangután).

  It's spelled R (as in Rioja); O (as in Orangutan); B (as in Barcelona); E (as in Spain); R (as in Rioja); T (as in Tiger); O (as in Orangutan).

• Benjamín: Muchas gracias. ¡Adiós, Roberto!

  Many thanks. Goodbye, Robert.

7.1. Exercise

8. Dialogue Exercise

Dialogue

Try translating the following dialogue from the top of the ¿Cómo te llamas?

9. Summary

Summary

In this lesson, you have learned

• How to greet people (Hola; buenos días; adiós).
• How to introduce yourself (Me llamo Rosa).
• How to introduce others (Se llama Roberto).
• How to say how you are (Fenomenal; fatal; bien).
• How to spell your name (Se escribe P-E-T-E-R).
• How to ask others about any of the above (¿Cómo te llamas?; ¿Cómo estás?; ¿Cómo se escribe?).
• The Spanish Alphabet and how letters are pronounced.