AUDAZ REVISTA
You are not making 15 mistakes. You are making five.
Almost every English mispronunciation of a Spanish food word traces back to five sound rules that English does not share.
THE SURPRISE
The confident errors are overshoots
Chorit-so and haba-nyero are not people undershooting Spanish. They are people adding foreign-sounding noise that belongs to a different language.
Linguists call this a hyperforeignism: a pattern spotted in one loanword and then wrongly applied to another.
RULE ONE
ll is a y, never an l
Tortilla is tor-TEE-ya. Quesadilla is ke-sa-DEE-ya. Pollo is PO-yo, which matters, because polo with one l is a shirt.
Over 90 percent of Spanish speakers merged the old ll and y into one sound. It is called yeísmo.
RULE TWO
There is no English j in Spanish
The Spanish j is made at the back of the throat, close to the ch in the Scottish loch. Jamón is ha-MON. Ajo is AH-ho. Rioja is ree-OH-ha.
The same sound appears whenever g comes before e or i.
RULE THREE
Chorizo, three ways
Madrid says cho-REE-tho. Mexico City says cho-REE-so. Both are correct standard Spanish. London says cho-REET-so, which is borrowed from Italian.
The th system is called distinción. The s system is called seseo. Pick one and stay inside it.
RULE FOUR
The h is silent. Always.
Horchata is or-CHA-ta. Habas is AH-bas. Huevos is WE-vos. Spanish h is a leftover from Latin spelling and it makes no sound at all.
One catch: ch is its own letter and does make a sound, the ch in church.
RULE FIVE
Five vowels, and none of them slide
English vowels glide. Say no out loud and your mouth moves twice. Spanish vowels are five short sounds that stay put.
This is why your paella still sounds English even after you have fixed the ll.
THE WORST OFFENDER
Paella is pa-EH-ya
Three short syllables, stress in the middle. The first is a short pa as in father, not the English word pie. The last is a clean ah, not uh.
The word is Valencian. In Valencian and Catalan it means the pan, and the dish took the name of the thing it is cooked in.
THE VERDICT
It was never an accent problem
Someone who says tor-TEE-luh also says ca-luh for calle. The habit does not stay on the menu. It follows you into every sentence you speak.
Tap through for all 15 words, the full table and how to actually fix a pronunciation habit.