LingoDrop
Spanish · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "o" in Spanish?
oh — a single pure vowel with no glide, shorter than the English "oh".
One unstressed syllable that binds two options together and takes almost no weight of its own. In "¿té o café?" the two peaks are TÉ and fé, with the "o" as a hinge so light it can nearly vanish into the vowels either side of it.
Listen: o
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
¿Té o café?
Tea or coffee?
Listen: ¿Té o café?
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"¿Té o café?" is a good demonstration of Spanish accents doing different jobs in one short question. The accent on "té" is a distinguishing mark separating tea from the pronoun "te"; the accent on "café" is a stress mark, pulling the beat to the last syllable of a word that ends in a vowel. Say the phrase and you get three vowels in a row across the middle — teh-o-ka-FEH — all linked.
Where English speakers slip
There is only one sound here, and English speakers diphthongize it — "oh-oo" — because that is what their own "oh" does. Clip it short. The written form has a companion rule worth knowing: before a word starting with an o sound, "o" becomes "u", so it is "siete u ocho", not "siete o ocho". The change exists so the two identical vowels do not merge into one.