How do you propose to go shopping in Barcelona if you can't pronounce 'euro'?

I sure do wish Spain had not adopted the Euro.  But not for the reasons you might think; I have a terrible time trying to pronounce the word, but at least it's not as hard as the way the Italians pronounce it with their propensity for distinguishing every letter so that it comes out sounding sort of like ai-oo-rrr-oh.  The Spanish seems a little less obsessed with perfection and sounds more like ee-ooh-rroh.  I think I'm getting better at it with my Pimsleur Spanish audio recordings--it uses the word often in its lessons about shopping.

 Here is Jorge addressing a most important topic: dinero.  He uses the word euro frequently.  Check your pronunciation.  (It's a great video in itself). 

This is only the tip of the iceberg in the process of language acquisition and is probably the major reason why people who are fluent often still have an 'accent' which they can't seem to shake no matter how hard they try.  Some sounds in Spanish are just completely different from their English equivalents and those little phonetic helpers are often not much help at all; in fact, they can be harmful in that they train you to pronounce the letter or word incorrectly, and once you learn something incorrectly, it's hard to unlearn it.  To this day I have to struggle to remember that the 'e' in the Spanish word bien, is not pronounced like the 'a' in the English word 'day,' but more like the word 'bend,' (and even that is only an approximation).  I picked up this bad habit from my Freshman Spanish teacher, who was the sweetest lady in the world, but who was not a native speaker and who had learned the sounds incorrectly herself. 

I'm not sure I agree with the linguistics theory that once you pass a certain age, it becomes impossible to produce some sounds that are not unique to your mother tongue.  I don't see why that, with a little coaching and a lot of listening to the correct pronunciations and perfecting them in practice, anyone can't eventually succeed in reproducing any of these 'foreign' sounds.  The purists claim that as we age, we not only can't reproduce some of these sounds, we can't even hear them!  I will agree with these nay-sayers in one respect:  you may not hear the subtleties of certain sounds until many exposures in which you listen extremely carefully to the sound.  A good example is the Spanish 'd.'  There are times when it sounds very close to the English 'd,' but other times when you need to add a soft 'th'-like sound to it.  I like to form my mouth as if to say a 'd,' and then to say instead 'th.'  And on top of all this, there is the problem of dialects, when some "c's,"  for example sound sort of like "th's," thinko for cinco, for example.  This is one case where persons who speak English have an advantage, since many English words contain that 'th' sound.

It all boils down to the simple fact that English is not a dialect of Spanish, even with its strong Latin roots.  Though an 'accent' may sound interesting and perhaps even sexy, everyone will immediately know that you're an outsider, a forastero.

Hasta pronto...