Llámame cuando sea terminado.

English Translation

Call me when it’s done.

Llámame cuando esté terminado. [?]

Any thoughts? (That was actually posted by me, but it was attributed to @system.)

English Translation

Call me!

In the new fast fluency track, for the sentence “Llámame!”, the male voice pronounces the “lláma” in “llámame” like “jama” in “pyjamas” rather than like the “y” in “you”. Can a native speaker say something about this pronunciation? Thanks!

Also, the sentence I’m talking about was assigned to the wrong topic due to a bug. Wrong forum discussion linked to sentence

From your description it sounds like the pronunciation of ‘ll’ (and ‘y’) characteristic of Argentina and Uruguay. That is a bit off for this sentence, as they would be using voseo: "“Llamame”.

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The description is a closer match to a Bogota accent.

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Thanks for your help, I appreciate it. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m confused because the pronunciation I described is very different from what I’m used to from the Common Words collections. He also pronounces the “ll” in “ellos” like the “j” in “pyjama” or Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”, not just the “Llámame”.

But the audio in the Common Words collections is synthetically generated and the audio in the new Fast Fluency Track is recorded by human native speakers as far as I know. So this unusual pronunciation can’t (shouldn’t) be wrong.

I understand that Spanish is spoken all over the world and different regions have different accents. My worry is: I have no native speaker to correct my pronunciation, so it’s crucial to me that I get my pronunciation correct from the start as I’m mimicking the sound.

I’d rather sound like someone from South America than from Europe, so should I get into the habit of shadowing/chorusing this New Fast Fluency Track native speaker? And imitate the “Pyjama”/“Jolene” sounding “ll”?

I don’t want to Frankenstein all the different accents from native speakers from different countries and the synthetic voices.

If you don’t want to have a particular accent then just pronounce ll and y as y.

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On the Llámame Wiktionary page it lists four pronunciations (click on “more” at the right of the IPA line under “Pronunciation”).

None of these are the same as the “J” in pyJama or Jolene (whose beauty is beyond compare, with flaming locks of auburn hair, with ivory skin and eyes of emerald green). The symbol for that sound would be written d͡ʒ in IPA, but the closest is ʒ which is the “s” sound in leisure and vision, or the “J” sound of the French empress Joséphine Bonaparte (chestnut-brown hair, hazel eyes and a sallow complexion according to Wikipedia).

On Forvo, there is someone from Spain who says llámame in the middle of a quotation, and this sounds much more like the d͡ʒ of Jolene (her smile is like a breath of spring, her voice is soft like summer rain).
You can listen to this pronunciation and see if you agree.

The map at the bottom of that page suggests that this person is from Andalucia, however there’s nothing on the Wikipedia page for Andalusian Spanish to suggest that this sound is normal for ll. On the other hand, in the pronunciation of the letter “c” in the word silencio the person demonstrates distinción and so is almost certainly from Spain.

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