There are actually two J sounds in Spanish. In the Caribbean and Central America, the jota has a softer sound. This softer J is much easier for new Spanish learners because it's closer to the H sound in English. It sounds like the H in “hand”, but more in the back of your mouth (and also a bit longer).
Spanish being a different language than English, it can have different pronunciation for the same letters. The letter H in Spanish (and Portuguese and French) has no sound. The English 'J' as in janitor sound does not exist in Spanish.
In Spanish the letter j is pronounced as the "h" in the word "heart". The letter y is pronounced just like the "y" in English . Let's look at a few examples. Soy jardinero.
The Spanish "j" is a strong guttural sound similar to the "ch" in the Scottish "loch".
The letter J sounds like the HARD G in Spanish (the sound is similar to the English H but raspier). You can produce the sound anywhere in between numbers 8 and 9 on the image below.
Mastering The Spanish J Sound
It's not nearly as tricky for most English speakers as the RR or LL, for example. In reality, however the “jota” (or J) in Spanish makes a unique sound that doesn't really exist in English. You can approximate it with an H sound (such as in “hello” and “hard”).
The same reason why Japanese have trouble pronouncing l after a consonant. J is pronounced like h or is entirely silent in Spanish and g has three different sounds. hard, soft and “h”.
18 Answers. It's simply dialect. "Yo" in Spanish means "I" in every Spanish language country, some just pronouce it differently depending on the country they are from or descended from. For instance because I speak Spanish in the Mexican dialect I say "Jo", pronouncing the Y with more of a "J" sound.
If the h is silent, why does it exist? For reasons of etymology (word history) only. Just as the "k" in the English "know" and the "b" in "lamb" used to be audible, the Spanish h used to be pronounced ages ago. Almost all Spanish consonants have become softer over the years; the h became so soft as to become inaudible.
The letter H
This letter is always silent unless it is next to the letter C. When you see the letter C next to an H you need to make a ch sound. This sound is almost identical to the 'ch' sound in English. In the Spanish alphabet, the word that represents the letter H is hache.
The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, use ⟨j⟩ for the palatal approximant /j/, which is usually represented by the letter ⟨y⟩ in English. Notable exceptions are English, Scots and (to a lesser degree) Luxembourgish.
French R Vs Spanish R
The French R sound is produced at the back of the mouth, where you'll pronounce the G of “get” in English. In France, the French R is never the Spanish rolled R, nor is it the very guttural Spanish J as in Jesus.
Pronunciation 1: LL Sounds Like The English Letter 'Y'
Just as you learned in your beginner course or textbook, ll most often sounds like the English letter 'y' as in the words “yellow” and “yes”. This is the way ll is pronounced in Spain, parts of Mexico, and most of Central and South America.
Some famous examples include: Russian, Yiddish, Albanian, Armenian, Greek, and Turkish. But, languages without the /j/ sound as in English yellow, and French caillou (which means pebble) seem to be extremely rare.
The letter 'J' in 'mojito' is a silent entity. Instead, the name of this extremely popular highball cocktail from Cuba, that's made using five ingredients - white rum, sugar (traditionally sugarcane juice), lime, sparkling water and mint - is pronounced as mo-hee-toh.
How did J get its sound? Both I and J were used interchangeably by scribes to express the sound of both the vowel and the consonant. It wasn't until 1524 when Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian Renaissance grammarian known as the father of the letter J, made a clear distinction between the two sounds.
J in German is pronounced as “yott” (rhyming with “thought”). The German J is pronounced as an English Y. This can be observed in words like ja, Jammer, and Jahr. Q in German shares a similarity with English: it is always paired with a U.
The letters k and w do not occur in Spanish words unless the word has been borrowed from another language such as English or even Japanese. For example, el karate is considered a “Spanish” noun, even though the k is not a Spanish letter.
J. Some of you may be happy to know that we have at this point only one English word in which the j is silent: marijuana.
The Spanish Alphabet: Sounds And Letters
The table above includes the four extra letters that are often included in the Spanish alphabet: ch, ll, ñ and rr.
People of Madrid, and most parts of Spain, pronounce the letters z and c (when before an e or i) different from people in Latin America. This difference in pronunciation is what's called the “Spanish lisp.”
The sound [dʒ] in Modern English is a late-comer, and was not significant in Old English. Old French [dʒ], which was more significant, derived from various (post-)Latin sources, including i~j (also *g plus front vowel). The English practice of writing <j> for [dʒ] was borrowed from French (as were words so spelled).