The classes in the Spanish major are absolutely fantastic. I have heard from many people in other majors that their required classes have no immediate benefits; it’s just a bunch of arbitrary knowledge that they are expected to know for some reason. I have noticed the exact opposite in the Spanish department. Every single class I have taken has helped me in real time and I have been able to put into practice the things I am learning. Last fall I took Spanish 378 Spanish Phonetics with Meghan Armstrong and it was one of the most useful classes I have taken in college. I noticed changes and improvements in my spoken Spanish almost immediately.

We learned that in English a lot of our vowel sounds are actually diphthongs, or more than one vowel sound pronounced together. In Spanish they have very short and simple vowels. Therefore the tendency for an English speaker is to make the simple Spanish vowels into diphthongs. This helped me correct myself and it improved my Spanish immediately.

I also learned about the schwa sound in English. Schwa is the neutral sound for English speakers that we default to, like in “umm.” For English speakers it’s just the easiest sound to make so we just automatically go to it. However this sound doesn’t exist in Spanish, so this tendency was another realization I had about my spoken Spanish.

Another epiphany I had was when learning about accented syllables in words. I learned that words that end in a consonant except s and n are accented on the last syllable. Words that end in a vowel, s, or n have the second to last syllable accented. And if the word doesn’t follow these rules, then a written accent is put above the stressed syllable.

I also got to learn how to use the Pratt linguistics software and it helped me because I got to see a physical representation of how I was speaking and how I could fix it. I could talk about this class for hours and how much it improved my Spanish. This one class radically improved my grasp of the Spanish language and changed my ability to speak the language with confidence, and for that I will always remember it.