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Do you ever get the feeling that no matter how much effort you put into improving your Spanish, native speakers never seem to understand you any better? If so, the odds are that what’s failing you is not your vocabulary or grammar, but your accent.

You don’t need to have a perfect accent to be understood by Spanish speakers, but you need to avoid certain mistakes that make Spanish very difficult to understand.

Here are five tips that will help you improve your Spanish pronunciation in just ten minutes. You can practise these tips with our Spanish Podcasts for Beginners.

Make sure you’re saying the vowels correctly. The Spanish vowels are very straightforward, but it’s often tempting to pronounce them like in English. You can hear and practise the five Spanish vowels with our Spanish podcasts and their interactive multimedia transcripts.

Remember that the Spanish ‘h’ is silent. To practise it, go to our Lesson 2 – interactive multimedia pdf.

Don’t drop the ‘e’ at the end of words. This is often a problem with words that look similar in English, for instance: pasaporte and cliente.

Remember that the ‘u’ in the clusters ‘que’, ‘qui’, ‘gue’ and ‘gui’ is silent.

Avoid producing sounds that don’t exist in Spanish. The two main ones to avoid are the English sounds ‘sh’ and ‘z’.