[sarahlouise]

I need help to understand why a person from spain when learning english would say b instead of v as in berry good instead of very good, and j instead of y as in jes instead of yes. IS there any activities i can do to solve this. thank you

[lancemaria]

maybe it's because of their language,that's why they have some difficulty in it.

[emile]

This is due to First Language Influence of their mother tongue on English.

If they have no 'v' or 'y' sound in Spanish, they will use the nearest approximation. Because we learn sounds even before we learn words, this is a very deep-rooted issue.

A good resource is the book 'Ship or Sheep', which comes with a CD and gives plenty of pronunciation practice

[susan53]

If you can work on-line with your student, try the supplementary pronunciation activities which OUP provides for English File. And if you can't, you can use the ideas to do the same thing in the lesson.

[DaveESL]

There a good list of minimal pairs here: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/

[mesmark]

I'm not that educated in Spanish but the problem may be that in Spanish those two sounds are indistiguishable from each other. b and v are very similar in formation.

Also, in languages there can be conditioning that makes them choose one sound over the other. I assume that's your problem. That may be why they use 'berry good' but may use 'v' for 'variety.'