LEARN SPANISH WITH

MARIA FERNANDEZ

Written by Maria Fernandez

In this article you're going to learn and practice ten common Spanish expressions.

These ten expressions all come up in the dialogs in my Spanish for beginners course on this site.

To help you learn them well, first I'm going to give you the ten expressions together with their English translation, and then I'm going to focus on their pronunciation difficulties. Once you're familiar with all the expressions, we'll do a speaking drill.

Here are the ten expressions. Click on them to hear them said by native speakers.

menos mal - it's just as well

no me quedan ... - I don't have any ... left

As you can see, they're all very useful expressions that come up frequently in conversation. To make sure you're saying them correctly, I'll take you through the pronunciation mistakes you might be making.

In general, watch out for the vowels. This is what they should sound like. Click on them to hear them:

a e i o u

Check that you're not dropping the final 'e' in 'tiene' and 'vale'; and that the final 'o' in 'no', 'mismo', 'cómo' and 'claro' sounds like the 'o' above and not like in the English word 'go'. Also, make sure that your 'e' never sounds like the 'e' in the English word 'me', but like in the word 'egg'.

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* Please notice that the articles in the subscribers' area of this website unfortunately cannot come with a visually impaired friendly version.