Okay, for a while now, I’ve wanted to learn Spanish. The trouble is, I can’t roll my R’s. This becomes a problem when a word with a single R could be confused with another similar word with two R’s if not pronounced properly.
My question is: Can I learn how to do this? I’ve asked people who speak Spanish, both native speakers and those who learned it as a second language. Most say they “just do it”, i.e., they can’t remember how they learned and it just comes naturally. I’m looking for someone like me, who couldn’t roll their R’s and was taught.
I just do it so I can’t help you there. I can tell you a kid who can’t roll his Rs would have a very hard time in school as he’d be made fun of by the other kids…
Come to think about it… why is it called “rolling” the R? Rolling suggests something going smoothly… shouldn’t it be “rattling” the r?
Place your tounge on the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth - with as little pressure as possible (very gently)
Then blow with your tounge in this position - if you blow har denough your the air will fore it’s way betwwen your tounge and your mouth forcing your tounge to vibrate producing the rolling sound.
Do this at your desk at work so the person in the cube next to you has really interesting stories to tell people at the vending machines tomorrow morning.
There are native spanish speakers who cannot roll their R’s either. they are considered to have a speech impediment by their fellow native language speakers, just as we would consider a lisp or stutter to be an impediment. There is a growing body of evidence that the inability to roll the R has a neurologic basis.
I learned this because my daughter is a polyglot; speaking spanish, russian, japanese and latin, in addition to english. It’s been very frustrating for her to be fluent in spanish, but be unable to roll her R’s. She’s tried all of the above-mentioned, and even considered seeing a speech therapist but finally decided to accept her limitations.
FTR, I cannot roll my R’s either, but my wife and other daughter can, and take great joy in pissing us both off by doing so.
Is the rolling “R” in Spanish different from the rolling “R” in German? I’m used to doing a rolling “R” in German by using the base of the tongue and have simply assumed my Spanish rr’s were passable?
Speech therapy can help. When I travelled to Slovakia this summer, one of our hosts was a speech therapist at the university there. She had me repeat certain sounds over and over - and also used the back of my toothbrush to move my tongue back and forth while she was doing it.
I still can’t “r-r-r-r-r-r” like most people can. But I could eventually pronounce words like “dobry” (good) properly. I do have to think hard about what I’m saying or I’ll forget and mispronounce something.
She also told me that her son had to have his tongue cut when he was a child. I guess that’s another way to be able to roll your r’s.
My doctor recommended the tongue cutting, too! He said that I might end up with some sort of speach difficulties if they didn’t do it.
The piece he was considering slicing is the bit on the underside that connects the toingue to the floor of the mouth.
Fortunately, my mother is a sensible woman and since I wasn’t having any difficulty speaking,refused to let him perform the procedure. I still can’t roll my Rs, though, except once, when I was really drunk.
I took Spanish in high school and had a difficult time rolling my “r’s.” (Well, I have a difficult time with the English “r” also.) What has worked passably for me is to actually roll the tip of your tongue over your hard palata toward the top of your top teeth and at the same time pronouncing “r” English style.
I once had a Spanish professor from Lima, Peru - he couldn’t roll an R to save his life. Maybe the influence of Native American phonemes there had an effect, but I thought Lima was supposedly more “Spanish” than the interior, well I’m not a linguist.
I speak Spanish with a Chilean dialect, from my father being Chilean. So I can give the R a very slight roll. But I can’t do the extremely trilled R that Mexican ranchero singers can do. To me the Puerto Rican rr is more like a French r, or even a strong h. So rolling the R one way or another isn’t a big deal - as long as the initial R or double RR is longer than a single R sound - just practice saying “pero” and then “perro” until you get distinct r sounds.
Even though some people can’t do the trilled “r” sound, some can do it but only with extensive practice. When I took my first Spanish class, I practiced the trilled “r” sound constantly. For weeks upon weeks it seemed, even though I practiced many times a day, that I would never be able to do it. Finally, after about 3 months of daily practice, I was able to do the trilled “r” sound. Guess the moral of the story is that even though some people absolutely cannot roll “r’s”, it still could be good to try and see.
