Trevor Huxham

This blog post has been literally years in the making. Although I’ve happily moved back home to Texas, the city of Santiago de Compostela in far northwestern Spain gave me two of the best years of my life. I spent much of that time drinking an expertly-pulled  café con leche , indulging in a fresh butter croissant (or two), and going out for tapas with friends in the old town. I cooked most of my meals at my apartment, but that’s not to say I didn’t gain an intimate knowledge of the cafés, bars, and restaurants in the Galician capital. View this post on Instagram Café con leche & chocolate con churros—breakfast of champions ☕️🍫 // #coffee #cafe #chocolate #churros #santiago #santiagodecompostela #breakfast #spain #galicia #snapseed #GaliciaCalidade A post shared by Trevor Huxham (@trevorhuxham) on Feb 8, 2015 at 7:57am PST Whether you’re a freshly-arrived pilgrim weary of the Camino , or a visitor wit...

I’ve talked some about Spanish pronunciation on the blog before, from how to speak Spanish like a Spaniard to tips on learning how to roll your Rs ; in fact, they’re two of my most popular posts! Today I’d like to share a little bit of what I learned when I took a Spanish linguistics course in college. Don’t worry, I’m going to make sure to explain everything in layman’s terms, but these subtle, rarely-discussed differences between English and Spanish were transformational in getting me to lose my American accent in Spanish and have made me sound much more native. I hope they help you as much as they helped me! Plaza de San Nicolás, Madrid 1) B, D, G are soft, not hard consonants This was one of the first things I picked up on in my linguistics class and it totally blew my mind. At the beginnings of word or phrases, the B, D, and G sounds are “full stops” or are pronounced strongly, just like they are in English: vinagre , día , and gamba  begin with clean, firm Bs, Ds, a...