The speaker in the Spanish audio recording of “LingQ 101, Getting Started” does not pronounce the s’s in words like “muchas” and “escuchar”. I had heard that some Spanish speakers drop s’s in certain words, but I had never heard it before today. The speakers in the audio for beginning Spanish courses typically speak very slowly and enunciate very clearly, so I was a bit thrown by hearing very rapid speech with “swallowed” s’s.
I recommend that you listen to and read a lot of different content. You will find the collections that you most enjoy and spend most of your time listening to them. You may also find that your tastes change over time. We have Spanish content from many different countries.Good luck at LingQ.
I believe this is more an issue of where the speaker is from in the recording. This speaker is from Uruguay where they presumably pronounce things a little differently than in Spain, for instance.
That’s right, swallowed “s” and also pronounce “c,z and s” with the “s” sound. That’s the case for south american spanish and people from the south of spain with a very strong accent (but I believe there are no lessons with this strong southspanish accent in lingq’s library). In Spain we pronounce all the words, we don’t drop any sounds (except for the “h” that is silent in spanish). So mark is right, that’s because he’s from Uruguay.
Hello Student1005, I am Mexican, not Spanish, and while it’s true that some Spanish people and some people from the Caribean sometimes will “swallow” the S’s, I would strongly advise you not to do it. The true rule in Spanish is that everything must be pronounced as it is written (with very few exceptions). As long as you understand what is being said despite the missing S’s in the pronounciation, don’t think too much about it and do not take it as standard Spanish because it is not.
This week I watched 2 movies made in Chile where they did this, and they were VERY hard for me to understand. I’m curious how widespread this is.
I find the accent from Spain (not from the south), Mexico and Peru/Columbia the easiest to understand. Uruguayan is a little bit of an outlier as is Argentinian and Chilean, and Venezuela, in my view.
We could ask Liszeth or Albert or Berta to do this and add them to the collection as different versions. The key is to have good sound. This is the first short lesson (only 4 lines) for all newcomers.
We can then decide which one we want as the default version.
What do you say?
I think its good for people to hear and learn to understand different accents, it is possible with practice. I remember before I came to Lingq I couldn’t understand Argentinian at all and had a hard time with the Spanish accent even, but there are plenty of lessons on here with both of those (the majority of the Spanish Lingq content is Argentinian) and it really didn’t take that long to figure them out. They only throw you through a loop for a little while ;D
I just listened to the recording of the Spanish 101. It is really too fast. I am going to ask Liszeth and Albert to give us two additional versions, one from Latin America and one from Spain, one female and one male.