Learning Spanish - Pronouncing ‘J’

I’m trying to learn Spanish through Duolingo and I figure it might be fun to write about a few of the lessons or fun facts I learn about the language.

Today, we’re going to start off with the pronunciation of the consonant J.

Examples

Spanish	English
jugo	juice
jamon	ham
jaja	haha

The last example explains the meme of Brazilian gamers in online gaming. They regularly employ this in place of lol, as the onomatopoeia for human laughter.

Linguistic Elements

J is a “voiceless velar fricative”. I’m going to try to to break this down to better understand the pronunciation.

Voiceless means it does not use the vocal chords. A good example is to compare z and s in English. It’s difficult to pronounce z while whispering, it ends up being identical to s. Whispering does not use vocal chords.

A fricative consonant is where air is forcefully expelled. Think consonants where you can hiss: s, f, z, and k in English.

Velar means the sound is produced towards the back part of the mouth. g in “get” is an example of a velar consonant in English.

In some regional dialects, J is a glottal consonant. Glottal consonants are produced in the throat (farther back). h in “hop” is a glottal consonant in English.

With all these elements together, it produces a sound that is like the k in book for English. For Vietnamese speakers, it is the kh sound in “không”.

Practical application

It’s difficult to get 100% accuracy because languages evolve and differ by region. There’s never a “correct” pronunciation other than “deviating less” from the norm among the general population.

For general speakers, substituting j directly for h sound in English will be correctly understood by native speakers. For more precise pronunciation, you’d want to aim for h in Hugh or huh, rather than h in hi.