RR in Spanish when you can't trill

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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby outcast » Thu May 25, 2017 4:31 am

blaurebell wrote: My husband says my "mierda" sounds a little Cuban, they say something like mielda instead of the trilled R :oops:


If coming from a lady I am in love with, I would find that irresistibly cute.

But in everyone else, I do find it absolutely shredding to my ears. But I accept it since that is how, as you say, many (but not all) Cubans speak.

I never had to learn the /r/, but it did have to learn the /R/ of Buhne Deutsch. It was very difficult and I spent quite of few months inside my car trying to get my throat to do it. I failed for many months, and then one day it just happened. Then I could not do it for a while again, and then it happened again. The intervals would get shorter and shorter until one day, I could roll the /R/ as long as a wanted it. I do use this sound in my German, though sometimes it makes it harder for me to say other words if I try too hard to roll, so I just let it come out however it comes out, either a roll, or sometimes a fricative /ʁ/, which is in fact the sound most Germans make. In fact of late when I speak French many of my /ʁ/'s where starting to roll a bit too much for my liking, so I have made a conscious effort to make my French r's very fricative and airy.

The sound that kills me is /t͡ɕ/ and the aspirated version /t͡ɕʰ/. To this day I don't know if I am doing them totally correct, but most of the time whatever sound I do make, it gets a passing grade. I do know my mouth mechanics are in the vicinity of what should be done to pronounce those sounds, but I don't think my /t͡ɕ/ is as crisp as that of Chinese (or Koreans, that also have this sound in their language), so yeah.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu May 25, 2017 7:11 am

It took me years to learn it, so don't give up. I had struggled with it in Spanish, but for some reason I mastered it pretty easily in Finnish when I first started learning it. I think it was because of the different vowel sounds. Anyway, I was then able to transfer the trilled r from Finnish to Spanish and now I rarely have trouble with it. I mostly only struggle when I'm paying too much attention to it or sometimes after an e or an i.

So my advice is -- learn Finnish. :lol: Some other tips would be to try lying on your back because gravity will help your tongue to fall into the right position. The problem with rolled r's is learning to keep the root of your tongue stiff enough to hold the position while have the tip of your tongue relaxed enough to flutter in the breeze. Lying down helps a little with that. Also, as was mentioned, some sounds lead more easily to a trilled r than others and it can be different for different people. I find it easiest to bounce off a d or t into a trill. In FSI they describe saying "tarde" like saying "totter they" (American accent, so more like "todder they") really fast. And that helped a little too though it was a while before I could transfer that to other words.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby tastyonions » Fri May 26, 2017 8:37 pm

zenmonkey wrote: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.

The Spanish J (/x/) exists already in the French "des banlieues": http://www.dictionnairedelazone.fr/dict ... cal/k/khey

:-)
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby zenmonkey » Fri May 26, 2017 8:44 pm

tastyonions wrote:
zenmonkey wrote: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.

The Spanish J (/x/) exists already in the French "des banlieues": http://www.dictionnairedelazone.fr/dict ... cal/k/khey

:-)


Uhhhh. :lol:

German is actually helping them for that sound.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby reineke » Sun May 28, 2017 4:35 pm

Uuuuh?
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby Sol » Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:04 am

Speakers of languages that don't have that trilled R find it hard to pronounce it, but I think there are also people that just can't physically make that sound, even if they're native speakers of a language with it. Like in Bulgaria, we have that rolled R but there are native Bulgarians who can't pronounce it and have to go to speech therapy, they usually are never able to make that sound even then. I wonder why that is.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby tarvos » Wed Jun 21, 2017 7:26 pm

It's one of the last sounds kids learn because it's mechanically one of the hardest ones to produce.
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby Xenops » Thu Jun 22, 2017 12:11 am

While it looks like the French "R" <ʁ> can be used in various dialects of Italian and Portuguese and Dutch, it's not interchangeable with the Spanish "RR" <r> ? At this point I'm finding the French version easier to say than the trill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_trill
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Re: RR in Spanish when you can't trill

Postby tastyonions » Thu Jun 22, 2017 2:52 am

You won't hear French speakers doing many true uvular trills outside of music (listen to some Brassens). Usually it is just a fricative.
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