Do you have a tip or trick for remembering accent marks and on which letter. (& similar umlauts, & other diacritics) I learned to converse on the streets and only a little book learning. Proper spelling and use of marks are a constant challenge. I notice I am improving as I do lessons. I have also started a habit of writing a translation of a part of the text. Then I translate the text back into the target language.
At this time I am studying intermediate-level Spanish.
Thanks for your assistance.
Texas John
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I’d first start with noticing/understanding the standard way Spanish words are stressed. For example, the default for most words without accents is to have the stress on the second to last syllable. When words end with consonants other than n or s, the default is to stress the last syllable.The words that follow these patterns aren’t written with accents.
Words that don’t follow the patterns above are written with accents. In these cases, if you know how to pronounce the word including the stress, then you can generally figure out if it needs an accent, if you can’t remember.
The above works for most cases. Of course, there are some exceptions/trickier things such as single syllable words, homonyms, etc. I found a more extensive explanation at the link below. Hope it helps!
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In general, in most cases, there is an actual reason why the word is spelled that way. Knowing the rules behind that can help me remember the accent marks, whatever they are!
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Umlauts and accents are two different stories.
Umlauts are actually different vowels, so they are really pronounced differently. lauten sounds different from läuten.
The accent in Spanish serves two different purposes. Number one is to mark a derivation from the default pronounciation rule as already explained by @hiptothehop . Note that there is often some regularity to be found here. For example, words that end with ~ciĂłn, which is the way words are nomalized in Spanish. Examples are relaciĂłn, distribuciĂłn, consideraciĂłn. As you can see, they all share the same placement of the accent, as their ending is pronounced the same.
Another possible reason is to differentiate monosyllable words that are pronounced identical but have different meaning, like el vs Ă©l. The first is the masculine definite article the, the second is the masculine personal pronoun he.
Note that ñ has no accent, it is a differently pronounced consonant, similar to the German umlauts.
If a language has several accents, they pronounciation should differ, but I never learned such a language so someone else has to add more precise information here.
Hope that helps.
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Lots of reading is the foundation of good spelling. After a couple million words read, you’ll probably be quite decent at spelling. If you get it up to 5 or 10 million, you’ll probably be quite good. Generally lots of reading alone is enough to be alright at spelling. You did mention that you did “only a little book learning,” which potentially means very little reading.
Writing will drill these things in. You can chat with ChatGPT, write Google reviews for the restaurants you visit, text your friends, write on subreddits in the language you’re learning, etc. Before you publish what you are going to write, run your text through a spell-checker or paste it into ChatGPT and ask if your spelling and phrasing is correct.
If specific spellings are giving you particular trouble, you can also drill them in whatever way you like. Active recall is the best way to do this and you can do it however you want, with cloze tests, translation, side by side comparison, Anki, writing out words in columns like you did in school, etc.
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