Every Letter in Spanish Pronounced Distinctly? Dream on!

Spanish Makes a Good Showing in the US

When I first began to study Spanish, I was very excited to read that unlike French, every letter is pronounced distinctly.  Absurdo! No es verdad.  While it's true that if you isolate individual Spanish words, you would clearly enunciate every syllable, every letter, when you're using the same word in a sentence, it may sound more truncated and more merged with the word that follows it.  Take the sentence ¿Dónde está el hotel?, for example.  I'd probably be understood by a native Spanish speaker if I recited this sentence with no elisions, enunciating every letter, but it would probably come across similar to an English speaker talking to someone they assume to be hard-of-hearing.  My understanding is that this sentence should be delivered sort of like this: ¿Dóndestál otel?  And this makes perfectly good sense, because we'd probably squish all those words together in English also:  Wherzthotel?  or something to that effect.

This condensing of words and phrases seems for the most part to just come natural after you've studied Spanish for awhile, but the problem arises when you're hearing someone else speaking and trying to isolate different words to make sense of the meaning of the sentence.  Scrunched up words just sound different from the way we learned them from vocabulary lists and textbooks.  

Still, it was a bit of a letdown when I discovered that Spanish is not quite as simple to pronounce as many would have us believe.  And most of the elisions make very good sense, because it often sounds awkward to pronounce two or three vowels together.  And as in all language acquisition, the only way to get the hang of it is to listen and practice; speak and practice.  

Hasta pronto.