LingoDrop
Spanish · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "el año" in Spanish?
el AH-nyoh — the ñ is one fused sound, and getting it wrong changes the word badly.
Two syllables — A-ño — with the stress on the first, as the rule for this ending requires for a vowel-final word. The ñ counts as a single consonant for syllable division, which is why the split falls before it. The plural "años" keeps the same stress since an s ending changes nothing about the default.
Listen: el año
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
El año pasado viajé a Chile.
Last year I traveled to Chile.
Listen: El año pasado viajé a Chile.
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"El año pasado viajé a Chile" uses the article where English says last year with none. "Viajé" carries an accent to hold the stress on the final é and mark the past tense, and it contains the throaty j: bya-HEH. Note the v is a b sound.
Where English speakers slip
This is the highest-stakes tilde in the beginner course. Writing or saying "ano" instead of "año" replaces year with a word for the anus, and it comes up constantly in sentences about someone's age. The ñ needs to be one continuous palatal sound — say the middle of English "canyon" and freeze there. Splitting it into "AN-yo" is understandable but audibly foreign; dropping it entirely is a genuine problem.