Reference · Sounds
Spanish Sounds & the IPA

The little spellings under every word, decoded.

Under each word on the dials you'll see a phonetic spelling like /li.βeɾˈtað/. That's the International Phonetic Alphabet — one symbol for one sound, so you always know how a word is said, not just how it's spelled. Most symbols are the letters you already know. This page is the handful that aren't. Every line has two ▶ buttons: sound says the bare sound on its own, word says the whole example word.

Looking for gender rules instead? → Noun Gender & Articles

How Elena will hear you In development

These symbols aren't just for reading — they're the checklist Elena's new ear listens with. Speech recognition is forgiving by design: say a flat English d in todo and it still hears todo. So alongside it we're building a second listener that keeps your raw audio and asks how each sound actually came out.

Because Elena set the sentence, every sound you meant to make is known in advance. A neural acoustic model pins each one to its instant in your recording and scores it against the native target — paying special attention to exactly the sounds on this page: one tap where perro needs the trill, a hard d where todo wants ð, vowels that glide instead of staying pure. Your melody and rhythm are compared against Elena's own rendering of the same sentence.

The result is never a score. It's a tutor's correction: "Your perro had a single tap — let the rr buzz." One sound, one fix, then you try again. Read how it works →

Self-test

Read the word, say it in your head, then tap the blurred spelling to check the sounds.