Soft “j”, that’s how.
Colombians pronounce the double-L and y as a soft j sound, like the j in “jay”, e.g. “llegar” = “jay-gar”, “yo” = “joe”, etc.
This is in contrast with the traditional pronunciation of those two sounds that you’ll hear in Spain as well as some other countries where they’re both pronounced with a y sound, e.g. “yo” is pronounced the same way it would be in English, “llegar” is pronounced “yay-gar”, etc.
And then there’s Argentina…Che.
They pronounce those two sounds as either (depending on region) a “ch” or a “sh” sound, e.g. “llegar” is pronounced “chay-gar” or “shay-gar”, “yo” is pronounced either “cho” or “show”.
Here’s a great video (short, ~1min) of two men, one from Spain and the other from Argentina, demonstrating the differences in their pronunciation.
And here’s an audio recording of a Colombian saying “pollo” (which means “chicken”). Sorry, I couldn’t find a video of Colombians demonstrating this particular aspect of their dialect.
I hope that was interesting, there will be more to come in this series. I’m just wrapping up my trip to Colombia (leaving for Chile in a little more than a week) so I’ve got plenty of material to write about, also… If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below! Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.
I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too
I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free. It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average. It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).
It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:
Cheers,
Andrew
