also I find very difficult to distinguish between the sounds of 'b' and 'v' and 's' from 'z' and how to pronounce 'y'. Any advice you could give me?gleki fa lo spano noi sebau ke'a zo jmive me zo pinxe Beati Hispani quibus vivere bibere est. ;)For 'b' the lips close completely; for 'v' they don't. For 's' and 'z', say "rescate" and "rasgado", then drop the 'g'/'c' and make sure you canstill distinguish them. For 'y', say 'a' with your mouth half-closed.
coi antonios. Welcome to the list! This excerpt from "What is Lojban?" might be helpful: http://lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure-utf/spano.htmlThe described v is one of the 'acceptable variants' of the v sound. The primary sound is the voiced version of f. Place your fingers over your throat, and say t as in 'tú' followed by d as in 'dar'. Feel how your throat vibrates for d but not for t. This is called voicing. In Lojban, f is the same (more or less) as in Spanish while v is it's voiced pair; like d is the voiced pair for d. Another pair is ll as pronounced in Argentina as a sh versus the Mexican pronunciation as a j in Lojban spelling. (No good letter for it, it's the sound z makes in the English word azure.) Here the Argentina version is unvoiced and the Mexican version is voiced. Oh -- g/k is a voiced/unvoiced pair that you have in Spanish as well.
The same will help you with s/z -- s is unvoiced and z is voiced. I'm not sure if the rescate/rasgado example is quite accurate, since I would pronounce both with the same s sound, but I'm not a native speaker either.
The IPA guide to pronunciation describes each sound. It's really technical, and I don't even understand all of it even though I can read IPA pretty well. However, it might help to associate sounds. For example, it says that t and d are both dental sounds, which tells you that your tongue is in the same place for both. The format they use is unvoiced/voiced then a word that describes the shape of your tongue, then a word that describes how the air interacts with your tongue. It's at http://lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure-utf/ phonapp.html
Would some recorded sounds help? I was tossing around the idea of making a sort of aid to pronunciation anyhow.
mu'omi'e .aleks.