Introduction 

By the end of this week you will have:

• deepened your understanding of the opposition between the orthography and pronunciation of consonants;
• developed an understanding of the differences between consonantal sounds in Spanish and English;
• reflected on the main difficulties in pronunciation for English speakers;
• reflected on your own practice and the most challenging points for your students.

As any English speaker in the process of learning Spanish might have noticed, there are many differences between the consonantal sounds of the two languages. It is obvious at first sight that there are many sounds in English that do not exist in Spanish. The opposite is also true. Certain segments of the Spanish phoneme inventory might not have an exact counterpart in English. In the following sections, we discuss each group of consonants and highlight the differences and potential difficulties.