# 4 Pronunciation of the letter ‘h’

You will now look at how to pronounce the letter ‘h’ in Spanish.

## Activity 4

Listen and pay attention to the pronunciation of the letter ‘h’. How would you describe the way in which this letter is pronounced in Spanish?

hola, Horacio, historia, hotel, hospital, Helena, Honduras, alcohol

This browser does not support audio playback.

Transcript

### Discussion

Notice that the ‘h’ isn’t sounded at all in Spanish, whether it’s at the beginning or in the middle of a word. This is one of the few exceptions to the rule of sound–letter correspondence in Spanish.

Sound–letter correspondence in Spanish

Most sounds in Spanish are represented by a single letter. This is true for all vowel sounds and also for most of the consonant sounds, with a few exceptions. This makes reading and writing much easier than in some other languages, even when you have never seen or heard a word before.

You will now hear the same words one by one. Listen again and practise repeating each word out loud. Record yourself as you do this and then listen back to your recording and compare it to the model.

View document
View document
View document
View document
View document
View document
View document
View document

OpenLearn - Getting started with Spanish 1
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.