Starter Greetings in Spanish

A great next step for learning Spanish is starting with basic greetings.

What are some of the most common greetings?

Hola                    Hello
Buenos Dias        Good Morning
Buenas Tardes    Good Afternoon
Buenas Noches   Good Night

For the first one, you can see that this word is almost a cognate.  Its very similar to the English spelling of the word 'hello'.  Another tip to take away from this word, is that the letter 'h' in Spanish is usually silent if placed at the beginning of a word. Hence, this word isn't necessarily pronounced 'hola' with a hard 'h'.  Its pronounced 'ola', with the silent 'h'.

The next three greetings are also pretty easy for beginners.  'Buenos Dias' - the pronunciation of this phrase is simple - phonetically it is similar to 'bweh-nos  dee-aas'.  While this isn't a literal phonetic spelling, its pretty close.  Its also important to remember where you are placing the stress.  In other words, where is the accent going on the word?  The capitalized letters should receive the accent, in each respective word:

phonetically:  BWE-nos DEE-aas

literally:         BUE-nos DI-as

For the other two greetings I've listed above, the pattern is the same.  Each phrase is going to have similar stress placed on each respective word.

Good afternoon:
phonetically:   BWE-nos  TAR-dess
literally:          BUE-nos   TAR-des

Good evening:
phonetically:   BWE-nas   NO-chess
literally:          BUE-nas    NO-ches

Remember that in Spanish, there are instances where you actually write in where the stress or emphasis of the word should occur.  In other words, you use an accent mark.  On these phrases, the accent marks should be places in the following locations, when writing them out:

Buenos días  (accent mark over the i)
Buenas tardes  (no written accent)
Buenas noches (no written accent)

While the last two phrases don't actually have a written accent - a good rule of thumb is as follows.  In almost every case, the stress of a word (the accent) should go on the second to the last syllable.

Its not too bad at all.  You can learn Spanish, its just going to take practice.  Try out these greetings on some of your friends or other acquaintances who speak Spanish.  You might be surprised how happy they are that you are trying to communicate to them in a language they are familiar with!