LingoflyA a
«a» is a vowel of the Valencian script, read as “a as in "father", never "uh"”. A clean open a, stressed or not — the vowel never fades to "uh" the way an English unstressed vowel does. For example, in the word “aigua” — water. The Valencian alphabet has 27 letters in total, and this character can be played right here. In the standard casa sounds "kaza" to the very last letter. Many local accents turn the final -a into an e or o sound, but the norm keeps a.
In short
| Character | A a |
| Sound | a as in "father", never "uh" |
| What it is | a vowel |
In our course the character comes 1st of 35: the order here is not alphabetical but from familiar to unfamiliar, after it comes b, appears in roughly every other word on this site.
How it sounds
A clean open a, stressed or not — the vowel never fades to "uh" the way an English unstressed vowel does
The character in a word
A lone character is hard to remember: memory holds on to meaning, and a letter has none. The word it stands in provides that anchor.
- aiguawater
The character in the “five vowels, five sounds” group
The great mercy of Valencian: every vowel sounds the same stressed or unstressed. A final -o never turns into oo, a final -a never fades. What makes the central norm hard on the ear simply is not here. Think of the vowels of Spanish casa — steady all the way through.
Words with this character
How to remember this character
A single letter is the hardest thing to remember: memory has nothing to hold on to — a character has no meaning. A three-step loop works: see the character, try to recall the sound (for «a» it is “a as in "father", never "uh"”, as in the word “aigua”), see the right answer.
And come back to it the next day, not in an hour: a check a day or two later beats a check the same day. Nobody holds the whole alphabet — 27 letters — at once.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
Frequently asked
How does the Valencian character a read?
As “a as in "father", never "uh"” — it is a vowel of the Valencian script. A clean open a, stressed or not — the vowel never fades to "uh" the way an English unstressed vowel does. For example, in the word “aigua” — water.