RR in Spanish when you can't trill

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Soclydeza
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RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby Soclydeza » Wed May 24, 2017 2:43 am

I've been learning Spanish lately and not being able to do the alveolar trill is killing me (I've been trying since I was learning Italian years ago, I think I've accepted that I just can't do them). I can do the single flap R just fine and end up doing that instead. The only thing I can think to do in place of the RR is to do the flap R and hold out the preceding vowel slightly longer (perro is pronounced like pero but holding the /e/, so it sounds like peeh-ro, for example). Doing it at the beginning of words is not a problem either (instead of rolling the R at the beginning of words, I can kind of breathe into a single flap R that seems to work).

For those of you who speak Spanish but can't trill your R's, what do you do?
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby perfektesLeben » Wed May 24, 2017 4:22 am

I had the same problem when learning spanish! I also can't trill the R. I only make the back of throat R (not sure how it's called) and being a German speaker this suffices. Although in southern Germany they roll it and i can't make that sound, so Instantly they know i'm a northerner :D Anyway i just accepted i couldnt make the trill and not looking hispanic no one expected me to speak perfect spanish, as long as i got my point across that was good enough. Unlike in Germany where they expect me to speak perfect German ha jokes on them :P But don't worry so much about it, i'm sure there's exercises you can make to help you out but really you can speak great spanish if you are confident and don't let it bother you. Does this make sense?
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby blaurebell » Wed May 24, 2017 8:36 am

Same problem here. I can do it in certain parts of the word - beginning and end - but in the middle I always fail. My husband says my "mierda" sounds a little Cuban, they say something like mielda instead of the trilled R :oops: That said, there are native speakers who can't do it either, so a speech therapist - logopeda - could probably help you. For myself I'm still trying to find an Argentinian speech therapist, because I would want to work on my accent in general, not just the trilled R.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby zenmonkey » Wed May 24, 2017 9:47 am

Maybe the problem with 'perro' is going from that 'p' sound into the trill?

Have you tried practicing with transitions that are a little easier to master?
Try going from a velar or glottal to r like in the name Jorge /ˈxorxe/.

Have you guys mastered the /x/ sound? Ojo, Oaxaca, Eugenio?

I'm trying to get my French daughters to pronounce these correctly and success is .... mixed.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby Steve » Wed May 24, 2017 2:57 pm

I'd encourage you to hang in there with trying to get the RR sound. I had resigned myself to doing work arounds with single R or other things and gave up on the RR as well.

I sort of accidentally fell into doing the RR sound when I was practicing other pronunciation. It came out accidentally one time (at the end of "por favor") trying to mimic the first Assimil lesson, and I figured, "what the heck, if I can do it once, I can do it again." I'm a native English speaker that could never roll Rs. It took me about 2 to 3 weeks of focused effort (spending some time on it most evenings) before I could start to make the RR sound reproducibly. I still probably have a lot of fine tuning that I'll need some native speaker feedback for. For now, the sound is functional for me, and I can place my tongue at different locations on the back of my teeth and alveolar ridge (? forgetting the term) and do it. I can also mostly control the number of "taps" from 2 to 3 to several.

I was working through Assimil "Spanish with Ease" at a lesson per day pace during the morning. Most evenings, I was spending an hour or more using Audacity (a sound editor) on my Mac to speak along with the first lessons. I would select single syllables, words or phrases, and then by hitting the space bar play them, over and over, trying to speak along with them. As I recall, it took a couple days before the first rolled R occurred. I was mostly focusing on the vowels and trying to do some sort of single R or D at the end of a word and the rolled R slipped out one time. It was during the first "por favor" in the first lesson. I was trying to mimic the speaker and out the RR popped by accident. I then tried to figure out what I did. It was intermittent for quite awhile and then eventually became more comfortable. Over a couple weeks, it eventually took hold.

First thing, I had done enough reading on the subject to know phonetically what I was trying to do. I had seen enough diagrams and read enough descriptions to know where my tongue was supposed to be.

Second, I just keep doing it over and over. I think the real issue was simply developing the muscle tone and control to do it. I don't know how many times I replayed that single por favor speaking along with it.

However, the biggest thing I have found that helped for learning Spanish pronunciation is having my mouth in the correct "default" or "central" position. (I'm sure there's some technical term I do not know.) When speaking English, my default position is somewhere near the end of the sound of "The". I'm from WI in the US. I pronounce "the" more like "thuhhh" with the vowel sort of close to mutt or putt. If I say "the" and freeze at the end, that is roughly where my mouth is sitting when I'm relaxed between words. It seems to me that Spanish has a different "default" location. (This probably varies by accent as well.) If I say the English words "thus" or "this" and freeze just before the s sound, it feels different and tight to me. However, from this type of position with my tongue raised and lips tighter, I find it much easier to pronounce more of the Spanish sounds. Vowels seems easier and many of the consonants feel more comfortable. At the beginning, I think my mouth kept dropping back into my English default between words and sounds. This meant my tongue and other parts of my mouth were doing a lot more work and were in an inconvenient position to start making the next sound. When I focused on putting my mouth in the different default position, I found that my vowels glide less. I also found that with my tongue and lips in a different starting position, some consonants seemed easier and more natural.

In hindsight, I think that first RR slipped out because my mouth and tongue were in the right position because in saying "por favor", I had gotten them into a better position and at the end of "favor", it just happened instead of a single R. For me, leading into the RR with an O or U sound seemed easiest to begin with. I don't know how many times I practiced sound combinations like "orrro" or "urrro" just to get the feel for it. I liked the word "burro" for awhile.

I'm hoping a native or advanced speaker could clarify this more. I'm at an intermediate level and have had very limited feedback from native speakers. Hang in there, if hundreds of millions of people can do RRs without thinking and a person like me can figure out how to do it in my mid-50s, you can too.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby klvik » Wed May 24, 2017 3:20 pm

Steve wrote:I'd encourage you to hang in there with trying to get the RR sound. I had resigned myself to doing work arounds with single R or other things and gave up on the RR as well.

However, the biggest thing I have found that helped for learning Spanish pronunciation is having my mouth in the correct "default" or "central" position. (I'm sure there's some technical term I do not know.) When speaking English, my default position is somewhere near the end of the sound of "The". I'm from WI in the US. I pronounce "the" more like "thuhhh" with the vowel sort of close to mutt or putt. If I say "the" and freeze at the end, that is roughly where my mouth is sitting when I'm relaxed between words. It seems to me that Spanish has a different "default" location. (This probably varies by accent as well.) If I say the English words "thus" or "this" and freeze just before the s sound, it feels different and tight to me. However, from this type of position with my tongue raised and lips tighter, I find it much easier to pronounce more of the Spanish sounds. Vowels seems easier and many of the consonants feel more comfortable. At the beginning, I think my mouth kept dropping back into my English default between words and sounds. This meant my tongue and other parts of my mouth were doing a lot more work and were in an inconvenient position to start making the next sound. When I focused on putting my mouth in the different default position, I found that my vowels glide less. I also found that with my tongue and lips in a different starting position, some consonants seemed easier and more natural.

In hindsight, I think that first RR slipped out because my mouth and tongue were in the right position because in saying "por favor", I had gotten them into a better position and at the end of "favor", it just happened instead of a single R. For me, leading into the RR with an O or U sound seemed easiest to begin with. I don't know how many times I practiced sound combinations like "orrro" or "urrro" just to get the feel for it. I liked the word "burro" for awhile.



To add to Steve's excellent post....

When I taught myself to pronounce the Spanish trilled R, I found it helpful to first do a warm-up to relax my jaw muscles. Even now, if the muscles of my jaw and face are relaxed, my Spanish pronunciation improves dramatically. I also found it helpful to go into a room where no one could hear me so that I could be LOUD. At first, I could produce the trill if I said the words loudly, but not if I said them quietly.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby sfuqua » Wed May 24, 2017 4:45 pm

I think I'm OK at the beginning and end of words, but I regularly bomb in the middle of words.

My wife and daughter, native speakers of languages that have RR, can both produce long, 5 second, RRs.

I know that these are not needed to speak Spanish, but I also know that most Spanish speakers can also produce prolonged RRs.

I can't get any RR to last more than about 3 taps...
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby sfuqua » Wed May 24, 2017 8:57 pm

What sound do native speakers of Spanish use when they can't produce RR?

A single tap R?
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby James29 » Wed May 24, 2017 11:40 pm

Soclydeza wrote:I've been learning Spanish lately and not being able to do the alveolar trill is killing me (I've been trying since I was learning Italian years ago, I think I've accepted that I just can't do them). I can do the single flap R just fine and end up doing that instead. The only thing I can think to do in place of the RR is to do the flap R and hold out the preceding vowel slightly longer (perro is pronounced like pero but holding the /e/, so it sounds like peeh-ro, for example). Doing it at the beginning of words is not a problem either (instead of rolling the R at the beginning of words, I can kind of breathe into a single flap R that seems to work).

For those of you who speak Spanish but can't trill your R's, what do you do?


Just be patient and give it some time. It will come. A couple years from now you will chuckle about this.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby the1whoknocks » Thu May 25, 2017 2:25 am

I know you asked for comments from those who cannot trill R’s in Spanish, but I thought I’d share my story since I wasn’t always able to do so. Others already gave some pretty solid tips, so I’ll try not to repeat all that.

Learning to trill R’s in Spanish was a gradual process that spanned at least a few months, for me. Maybe it shouldn't have taken that long, but it did. I progressed from not being able to produce the sound --> being able to produce the sound but mostly in isolation → being able to produce it in sentences, but often not very accurately and only if I tried very hard, --> sometimes being able to make it correctly but often being told my R’s sounded too ‘harsh; I was overdoing it ---> being able to produce the sound pretty effortlessly and accurately most of the time. It was a process, often frustrating, of improving over time.

In addition to what others have mentioned, 4 additional things helped me:

-1. Paying close attention to how I was pronouncing vowels. - Pronouncing them correctly almost allowed me to transition more easily to producing the RR. This might have helped ensure that my mouth was in the, "right position” that Steve mentioned. I really worked on pronouncing them as clearly as possible.

-2. Spanish tongue twisters (trabalenguas) - I wish I could find it, but there was a video on YouTube with a lady and a guy practicing Spanish tongue twisters; “Erre con erre cigarro” and two others. It was particularly helpful because the speakers started off slowly, and with each repetition, spoke faster. It was also helpful because one could watch how their mouths moved during the repetitions. I repeated after that 4 minute video everyday for about three weeks. With everything else I was doing, I was able to produce the sound fairly accurately afterwards. It helped that they spoke very clearly too.

-3. Thinking about the RR as more of an English L than as a R - Of course, Spanish’s trilled R and the English L are very distinct but something about that mental cue helped me, although not immediately. Again, I really wish I saved that video because they explained the rationale in a way that really clicked with me.

-4. Relax - Sure, making a conscious effort to accurately produce the sound helped, but for me it's a fine line sometimes between being focused/ attentive and being tense.

Anyway, I hope you keep working on it. The process and effective mental cues are likely different for everyone. I’ll post those videos if I ever find them.
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