Alveolar trill, rolling /r/ success stories

[Steve]

I tried on and off for some time to learn these in Spanish and basically gave up. I started substituting single tap Rs.

The biggest mental concept that helped me was due to one of Alexander Arguelles' videos taking about accents. One thing he talked about was the point of articulation and mouth positioning we use. It's sort of the default position we put our tongue, lips, jaw, etc. when we are speaking. It's the point of articulation that is much of the difference between accents within a language. The US English southern accept tends to have a more relaxed tongue further back in the mouth and lower jaw than say one some of the UK English accents where the tongue is further forward in the mouth and the lips are tighter.

I was using the first Assimil lessons (Spanish with Ease) with an audio editor on my computer to improve my pronunciation. I would select a short phrase and repeatedly hit the space bar to place it over and over while I repeatedly spoke along with it. I'd do this for perhaps 30 minute per evening. Two things I observed. First was that my point of articulation slowly changed with my tongue moving farther forward and upward than in my natural English speech as well as some changes in my jaw and lip positions. The second was that after 30 minutes of this my mouth would feel tired and almost a bit sore. After a few weeks, I found that this position became more comfortable and that my vowel pronunciation became much better as did my pronunciation of most consonants.

One night I was repeatedly following along with "por favor" to work on the vowels and the b/v sound. I was putting a sort of single tap R at the end trying to mimic the audio. Suddenly, my mouth just rolled an r at the end of "favor" by accident. I was surprised and it took a bit of work to do it again. However, within a week or so, I could do it reproducibly and comfortably. In hindsight, it was a combination of having a point of articulation closer to a native Spanish speaker than my native English and just exercising the muscles in my mouth enough so they could hold those positions. I found now that if I am speaking Spanish, the R is easy to roll. If I am speaking English and try to roll and R, I cannot do it until I mentally force myself to reposition my mouth for Spanish.

My sense of learning rolled Rs (at least as an English speaker) is that some amount of foundation must be laid by practicing easier things such as vowels to get your mouth used to the different positions and movements. Once your mouth is comfortable with a more Spanish like positioning compared to English, it becomes easier to pronounce various Spanish sounds.