PRONUNCIATION
Spanish spelling has the pleasant characteristic of being more or less phonetic. This means that if you know how to pronounce the letters of a word, it's relatively easy to sound out the word itself. Besides having a very small number of vowel sounds and a high predictablity of exactly what sound is represented by each letter, Spanish has a very clear set of rules about where a stress normally falls, and exceptions are noted with an "acute accent mark" ("´") over the vowel of the stressed syllable. Normally, words that end in a vowel or in "n" or "s" have the stress on the next-to-last syllable; all other words without an explicit accent mark are stressed on the final syllable. There are no "secondary stresses" within words. VOWELS a like 'a' in "art": casa e like the first component of the diphthong 'ay' in "day" ( este ). Since Spanish also has a diphthong 'ay',