Hi, I’ve been taught that there are two ways to pronounce “ll”. The first is the traditional “y” way. The second is pronounced kind of like “zh”. I’ve decided to use the zh way.
The problem I have had is that I’ve listened to a lot of things and read a lot of native material and listened to the audio for those lessons. I have also read a lot of guides on pronunciation and phrasebooks which have the pronunciation underneath the phrase but in nothing I have done have I heard the “ll” being pronounced “zh”. So is their only one way to pronounce it? How would you pronounce it?
If you want to learn how to pronounce the Spanish “ll” I suggest you listen a lot. Perhaps one of our Spanish native speakers will record some content with many occurrences of “ll”. I must say I do not relate “zh” to the 'll" sound.
The “textbook” pronunciation of ‘ll’ is either the ‘lli’ in ‘million’ or simply like ‘y’ in ‘yellow’, but (according to the Wikipedia article on Spanish dialects):
“The phoneme /ʝ/ can also be pronounced in a variety of ways. In most of the area where yeísmo is present, the merged phoneme /ʎ ~ ʝ/ is pronounced just as /ʝ/, or even /j/. In the area around the Río de la Plata (Argentina, Uruguay), this phoneme is pronounced as a postalveolar fricative, voiceless or weakly voiced (similar to /ʃ/ or /ʒ/). In Mexico, the phoneme is commonly, but far from universally, pronounced /ɟʝ/.”
Maybe this /ʒ/ is what gizmo2012 is talking about?