Did He Say Bengo or Vengo?

For me the biggest stumbling block to learning how to correctly pronounce Spanish was not the "th" sound for some "c's" in European Spanish (that sound is relatively easy for English speakers to mimic, since it sounds sort of like "lisping" an 's').  Nor is the the dreaded "ñ" with the tilde sound in words like mañana.  The hardest thing for me was distinguishing and producing the correct sounds for 'v' and 'b.'  And I probably still don't have it completely right.



When I first started learning, I could not hear a difference, but now I think I do a little better.  It's sort of like making an English 'v' sound, but slurred a little, and with the mouth held slightly differently.  The sound is taught in many American high school Spanish classes as just plain 'b,' whether it looks like a 'v' or like a 'b' in writing.  Obviously, this may be alright temporarily, so that don't have to stop learning until you master these sounds, but sooner or later, you want to avoid sounding like someone who never bothered to get it right.
This problem is indicative of a lot of the difficulties foreign language learners encounter.  Too often we try to adjust unfamiliar sounds to the way we would utter them in our own language.  Sometimes this is only a minor thing, but other times it could make your conversation completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.  

The only remedy to this, I'd say, is to listen to native speakers over and over.  ¡Escucha!  BTW, I like the way Spanish both begins and ends exclamatory and interrogative sentences with the proper punctuation mark.  It's looks interesting in writing and it alerts you right off the bat how the sentence should be pronounced and interpreted.  Even better than listening is to practice speaking, emphasizing those "v's" and "b's" until speaking correctly becomes second nature for you.  

A presto...