[namaemuta]

> The only problem was that my writing was miles ahead of my speaking

That surprises me because Spanish is one of the few languages that what you read is pretty much what you have to say. Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound (for example "que" that would be expected to sound k-u-e but actually sounds like k-e). The entonation is another story but despite of it, your pronunciation should be clear enough to understand you.

[ljm]

It’s mostly a case of confidence I think. When you write you have all the time you need to get the message right and tweak it to perfection, when it comes to speaking you don’t and you need to work on your sound in order to be understood. You can’t speak and instantly know how to write and it’s the same in reverse.

Speak too slow or sound unsure and plenty of people will default to English to give you a hand instead of waiting for you to figure it out. It has nothing to do with the phonetic simplicity, although it does help when you compare it to English, for example, which might as well be lawless because there’s practically no connection between the spoken and written form.

[vram22]

>That surprises me because Spanish is one of the few languages that what you read is pretty much what you have to say.

Sanskrit is like that too, pretty much, i.e. as far as:

"what you read is pretty much what you have to say"

goes. There is only one way to pronounce any letter or compound letter or word. In fact Hindi is too, except for regional differences in pronunciation, and both are unlike English in this respect, where a non-native speaker often fumbles to pronounce some words right (even apart from accent), because the right way to say a word can be very different from how it looks when written (if you try to build up the sound of the word from its component letters, at least in many cases).

Examples of this are: cut and put, argue and vague.

IIRC George Bernard Shaw made a well-known observation that I learned as a kid in English class; he is supposed to have said something like: in English, going logically by how you say / spell parts of other words, you could spell "fish" as "ghoti", i.e. "f" as in the "gh" of "laugh", "i" as in the "o" of "women", and "sh" as in the "ti" of "nation".

>Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound

In Spanish, the letter combination "ll" (two ells) sounding like a "y" is another unexpected one, as in "amarillo" (yellow) for example.

https://translate.google.com/#en/es/yellow

Click on the speaker icon under "amarillo" to hear it spoken.

"j" being pronounced as "h" is another one, at least for speakers coming from English.

Interesting stuff.