So, I’m finally getting around to trying to learn a proper alveolar trill. Even having worked out, crudely, how to make the tip of my tongue vibrate with minimal vibration in the velar, I find that once you add in co-articulation the task seems impossible. Before struggling on, I thought I’d see if someone here knows what’s supposed to be happening here.
First of all, the maneuver seems to require a great deal of time and energy. It seems to be okay coming off of a consonant that was alveolar in the first place. But from a vowel it seems like I have to pull of the side of the road to get through the trill without crashing. And for back vowels like the ‘u’ in ‘bush’ I don’t see any way around having to trill somehow further back on my tongue if I expect to be able to make it flow smoothly to the vowel.
What am I missing here? What are the expected co-articulation phenomena that people aren’t mentioning when they talk about how to trill?