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Accent guide — Romance

English pronunciation for Spanish speakers

Spanish speakers most often transfer three things into English: b and v collapsing into one sound, an extra e added before words that start with s plus a consonant (student becomes estudent), and English's rich vowel system — especially ship vs sheep — being flattened toward Spanish's five vowels.
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What actually transfers

The specific sounds to check

The b-v merger

Spanish b and v are the same sound in most dialects, so vine and bine, or berry and Very's first letter, can be hard to keep apart. English needs a genuine lip-and-teeth v, not a lip-closure b.

/b/vberry vs very

An e added before initial s-clusters

Spanish doesn't allow a word to start with s plus another consonant, so Spanish speakers often add a short e in front — student becomes estudent, Spain becomes eSpain. The fix is starting the airflow for s with no vowel before it.

/s

ship vs sheep and other short/long vowel pairs

Spanish has five vowels; English distinguishes short-i and long-e (and several other pairs) as separate vowels rather than one. That gap makes ship and sheep, or bit and beat, sound like the same word to an untrained ear.

/short-i/long-eship vs sheep

th depends on dialect

Castilian Spanish actually has a th-like sound (written c/z), but most Latin American dialects don't, so those speakers usually substitute s or t for both English th sounds — thin becomes sin or tin.

/th-voiceless/th-voicedthin vs tin

j and y

Spanish j is a throat sound (closer to English h) and y is a glide, so English j (as in jam) — a completely different, affricate sound — can be approximated with either, and jam can drift toward yam.

/j/yjam vs yam

Final consonants weaken or drop

Spanish syllables strongly prefer to end in a vowel, so English word-final consonants — especially in fast speech — can be softened or dropped entirely.

/t/d
A realistic plan

What a week looks like

Day 1-2

Drill five b/v pairs a day, keeping teeth on lip for every v.

Day 3-4

Practise s-cluster words with zero vowel before the s — hiss first, then the rest of the word.

Day 5-6

Drill ship/sheep and three more short-i/long-e pairs until the difference is automatic.

Day 7

Re-read the diagnostic line and compare it against your Day 1 take.

Not every point above will be yours

These are common, well-documented transfer patterns for Spanish speakers as a group — not a rule about any one person. Region, schooling and how long someone has spoken English all change which of these actually apply. The diagnostic line is there to tell you which ones are really yours, not the list above on its own.
Questions

Straight answers

Does the th sound depend on which Spanish I speak?

Yes — Castilian Spanish has a th-like sound for c/z, which can actually help with English th. Most Latin American dialects don't have it, so it needs to be built from scratch the same way as for most other L1s.

Why do English vowels feel so much harder than Spanish ones?

Spanish has five clear vowels; English has around twelve vowel sounds plus diphthongs. The gap isn't about effort, it's that several English contrasts (ship/sheep, full/fool) simply don't exist as separate sounds in Spanish.