The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)
hackingportuguese.com
hackingportuguese.com
I've heard people calling this way to speak "fala de apresentador da Globo": which means "Globo's presenter way of speech"; Globo is Brazil's most popular TV network and its presenters have a clear way to speak that sounds very neutral and free from accents from one region or another.
I lived in Rondônia during the 90's. It was a very recent state and, at the time, people from all over the country went to live there to make good use of the new opportunities offered by a recent new state. So, the people living there were mostly from other places and there was a mix of accents which made it basically accent-free.
All forms of pronouncing "r" are very easy to me. And, to help people understand what I say and because I lived among very different accents, I speak in a very "neutral" way. People have once said I have a "fala de apresentador da Globo". But this way of speech is not uncommon in most developed regions neither among people who have to talk to people of different parts of the country.
Result of this: Brazilians can speak most of the romance languages and even other less phoneme rich languages from Asia or Europe without much difficulty. We even make fun of hispanophonic latin-americans because they can't say "cair no poço não posso".
Mentioning this because the term is not widely known in the U.S., at least in my circles.
https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/rece...
Pt-Pt drops a lot of unstressed vowels whereas Br-Pt almost all syllables are pronounced.
Langfocus did a video on why (European) Português sounds like Russian.
Just like Hollywood and news broadcast, Brazilian soap operas have created the de facto Portuguese accent for non-Portuguese speakers.
I've never heard an Italian or Spanish person say they can't understand anything in a spoken Portuguese conversation.
Developing economy, speaking with a strong Slavic accent, recovering after a long dictatorship, you check many boxes :-p
I worked with someone from Romania. He said Portuguese sounds just like Romanian until you try to understand it, then it sounds like someone making fun of Romanian.
It's very very varied phonetically when compared to the neighboring Spanish, which IIRC underwent considerable simplification at in the 16th century with unification of Spain.
I've heard many French and Spanish native speakers expressing the difficulty to understand it.
Source: Portuguese native speaker with decades-long immersion in Spanish and French-speaking communities.
Of all the approximates people use for "the", the soft Latin "d" is quite close to the original, compared to, say, the Franco-German "ze"! Even here in Finland, we are quite fluent in English as such but many completely disregard the difference brought by the "h" in both phonemes, and just aspirate the "t" like you would do without the "h" (and then pronounce the other t's softly without aspiration at all!).
It's all comprehensible as long as its regular, I guess. Still, as an elementary Spanish speaker, I still often get distracted by the Brazilian r's, since instead of "r", I hear the Spanish "jota" or otherwise something I would describe as in the range of h-like sounds, not r's.
But I think the most difficult r is the Spanish r in perro. I like the way Chileans kind of sneak a zh in there: perzho.
Personal anecdote: once my mother (who speaks Spanish first) asked for me to dry the table with a sponge: Pega uma esponja e seca. Now, Spanish only has one e, but in Portuguese "seca" with an open e is "to dry" - the verb - and with a closed e is the adjective "dry". So I handed her a sponge and was duly reprimanded.
Do Argentines do this too or is that with just ll?
> Due to dyslalia, Jimmy Five is incapable of pronouncing the letter "r", replacing it with the letter l, in the Portuguese version, or with the letter w, in the English version. When the letter is used at the end of a word, however, he pronounces it normally (as in "car" or "locker").
What is fascinating about this cartoon is how diverse it is. I'd be hard pressed to name any other publication where one of the main characters has a speech impairment (which is often used to make jokes and puns), and that has side characters with various other disabilities, notably Hummer (Humberto), who's mute, and more recently Luca, a wheelchair-bound yet physically active boy. The cartoon isn't afraid of running stories about touchy topics like disability challenges, nor of using these topics for lighthearted comical effects.
It also pretty much single-handedly exposed generations of Brazilians to Guarani indigenous culture (e.g. what Monica fan doesn't know what Tupã[1] is), and frequently publishes stories about ecology preservation and morality.
IMHO, it's one of the best examples of minority representation in mainstream media done right.
- Monica (Mônica) - has ludicrous physical strength (quite easily the strongest person in the world in the cartoon). Gets made fun of by the boys for her big front teeth and responds by hitting them with her blue stuffed rabbit.
- Jimmy Five (Cebolinha) - Can't pronounce some words properly (as described above). Has exactly 5 strands of hair on his head and is always trying to steal Monica's rabbit, in an attempt to become the "owner of the street".
- Maggy (Magali) - REALLY likes to eat, is able to do so indefinitely. Many stories revolve around how quickly and much she can eat. Is often seen with a big slice of watermelon on her hands.
- Smudge (Cascão) - Has never taken a shower and is extremely afraid of water. The canon is that Smudge has never even touched a single drop of water in his life. Even has his own set of supervillains whose only goal is to get him to take a shower.
This is not even the tip of the iceberg of the shenanigans and characters from these comics. Monica's gang is such a special part of Brazilian culture and I hope someday it gets the international recognition it deserves.
I mean, yes, they have "diversity" and I think they have "minority representation done right" but - unlike any example of modern American cultural production - they don't do it to "tick checkboxes". The art and the stories come first. The characters are there to support the story, not to push some agenda.
Yes, this can't be emphasized enough. I mentioned inclusivity to weave a narrative, and although one could argue that more recent characters like Luca are more of the checkbox-ticking variety, generally speaking the character cast of Monica's cartoons is mind-bogglingly diverse, far beyond "wokeness" lines. There's Chico Bento (a hillbilly boy living in a farm) and his gang, there's Papa-capim (a Guarani boy living in the rainforest) and his gang, there's Piteco (a pre-historic man) and his friends, Bidu (a blue dog) and friends, Penadinho (a ghost) and friends, Austronauta (a spaceman), Rolo/Tina (young adults), Capitao Feio (an anti-hero), Horacio (a vegetarian t-rex), Louco (a literally insane guy) and the list goes on.
In a single edition, you could go from one story about a dog talking to a rock (yes, the rock is a recurring character), to another about the grim reaper bringing people to the afterlife (yes, she's a recurring character too), to one about Magali's gluttony vs Dudu's aversion to food. There's so much going on in the cartoon's universe that it's hard to do it justice with just a short comment on HN.
Seriously, I think I basically learned to read with their comics (along with Disney's) and it is impressive how some of these stories get stuck in our heads and definitely take a role in forming our personalities. With Disney's, there is the story where the kids use the duplicating machine to make infinite money, and end up learning about inflation. With Monica, there is one story where one of the boys (I think it's Cebolinha) are talking with Anjinho about the consequences of doing what they do to Sansão and if they are going to Hell for it, which becomes an amazing short but beautiful affirmation of Judeo-Christian values. Paraphrasing, Anjinho says something like "do not worry about Heaven or Hell and the afterlife, just use this life to bring as much of Heaven to Earth as you can"
edit: I don't know what he's actually called in english. Captain Ugly is the literal translation. By the way, 'Little Onion' is way cooler than 'Jimmy Five'.
His english name is Captain Fray (a name that was presumably carefully chosen in order to avoid the need for redrawing his shirt, which has a big F on it)
> Phonemes are not exactly the same thing as sounds, and they’re not exactly the same thing as letters. They are kind of like connecting categories that map letters to sounds … Phonemes are a way of saying, If you see a letter “r” is this situation, use Sound A for it. If you see “r” in this other situation, use a different Sound B for it. But Sound A and B are not fixed — they will vary depending on the specific dialect.
The problem is that this relies on letters, which is a problem because (a) many languages are unwritten, and (b) many other languages have weird irregular orthographies (e.g. English, French, Irish and Tibetan). Instead, in linguistics, the standard definition is that two sounds are different phonemes if they can be the only thing differentiating two words. For instance, in English, /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes, because we have pairs of words like pat and bat, which differ only in that one has /p/ and the other has /b/. By contrast, Mandarin has no such word pairs… but it does have the distinction between /p/ and /pʰ/ (where the latter has an extra puff of air, or ‘aspiration’), in words like /pa²/ ‘fall’ and /pʰa²/ ‘crawl’. But [p] and [pʰ] are not distinguished in English — we have a single phoneme /p/ which can be pronounced in either way, with no difference whatsoever.
(Of course, this definition can sometimes get difficult to apply. For instance, English has no minimal pairs between /h/ and /ŋ/ [the sound ending words like ‘sing’], because the one only occurs at the beginning of a syllable, and the other occurs only at the end. But by and large it works satisfactorily.)
What would the term be for units of sound which are perceptually distinct regardless of listener's perspective? E.g. [p] and [pʰ] are non-phonemic in English but are in Korean, and you can tell them apart with a spectrogram. Or is that just not a distinction linguists make?
Yes, exactly! This is a great way to describe it. (I think I might steal it for the future, even.)
> What would the term be for units of sound which are perceptually distinct regardless of listener's perspective?
The closest is ‘phone’, as mentioned by umanwizard, but I’m not sure there is any one word for this, because the concept itself is poorly-defined, and you can make two sounds arbitrarily close. Can you tell apart [a æ]? What about [a̝ æ̞]? How close can they get before you can’t distinguish them by ear? Before a speaker of another language can’t distinguish them by ear? Before you can’t distinguish them even with a spectrogram? And the language you speak really is important — I’m fine distinguishing [p pʰ], I think, but I know people who can’t even hear a difference. Linguists talk as if there were specific sounds, but really there’s only ‘fuzzy’ sets of sounds which people perceive as being more or less similar.
Mice pour (water into a jug)
My spore (as opposed to your spore)
BTW does your accent not aspirate "pour"? So you don't do /ma͡is pʰoː/?
That’s not what I mean. By ‘the word boundary is phonemic’ [not ‘phonetic’!], I mean that the word boundary can be transcribed on the phonemic level, and is thus allowed to influence the phonetic realisation of other phonemes.
> BTW does your accent not aspirate "pour"? So you don't do /ma͡is pʰoː/?
No, it does: [mɑ͡ispʰoː].
Actually as expected in Portugal, they have many dialects too. There are four main Portuguese dialect groups, all mutually intelligible: Central, or Beira, Southern (Estremenho), including Lisbon, Alentejo, and Algarve, Insular, including the dialects of Madeira and the Azores. There is even an extinct one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Portuguese. The Portuguese version of this wiki article has more information https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeu-portugu%C3%AAs
I grew up on and off in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and Brasília) and later spent 20+ years in the SF Bay Area. Once in a while I'd run into old-school Azoreans who'd lived in the Portuguese towns (Santa Clara, Newark, San Leandro, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero, Castro Valley) for a few generations and it was almost impossible to understand them until I started listening occasionally to the Bay Area Portuguese radio station. I'd mimic those accents and got a bit better at understanding those folks, but with cost/benefit ... Brazilians have said I now sound Portuguese, and Portuguese people say they can understand my Portuguese better than a normal Brazilian's.
I'm not sure how it's changed in the last decade, but in many SF Bay Area and Central Valley towns there are Portuguese "Sociedade do Espirito Santo" (Holy Spirit Society) halls and Catholic churches where Portuguese/Azoreans maintain their traditional festivals and music.
I think Neto's shut down its huge Santa Clara restaurant/market and reincarnated in a strip-mall/sausage-making operation, but at least a couple years ago you could still go and get an excellent Linguiça sandwich.
EDIT: Sociedade Espirito Santo, Neto's
Sounds like a Russian speaking Portuguese to me (American fluent in Brazilian Portuguese), pretty amusing but I can follow everything. I often think that when I hear PT-PT as well - interestingly someone in the comments says this sounds less Russian to them. I have very little exposure to non-Brazilian accents so no idea in general, but the difference sounds about as much as American English<->Scottish English to my ears.
I wonder if there's a way to measure the distance between accents? That would be really interesting. I'd be curious how close all the American accents are to each other, versus the British accents, etc. and then also in comparison to Portuguese accents and other languages.
I have trouble with Brazilian accents, on the other hand, because I mainly listen to PT-PT.
Yes, but every island has a different accent. That was filmed in S. Jorge and the accent there is quite mild. Some islands have stronger accents. Most notably S. Miguel, which in it's thickest form can be very hard to understand for mainland speakers.
I don't know anything about Portuguese, but I find a lot of Scottish varieties to be totally incomprehensible (I'm American).
The article is written from a brazilian standpoint, so keep that in mind when comparing with your own experiences of the language.
Recently, there was a polemic in social media that Portuguese mothers were worried their kids were only speaking "Brazilian", due to the dominance of Brazilian content creators in Youtube, Instagram, TikTok...
[1]: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/mundo/2021/11/4962302-... (Portuguese)
Pronunciation bothers us the least actually, but other things are weird and/or plain wrong for us:
- Lots of weird words adapted from English like "time" (pronounced "tee-me") which means team in PT-BR. Portuguese has a fine word for that already - equipa ("equipe" in BR) - and most of us speak good English so "time" is beyond weird for us.
- Wrong verb conjugations are used in informal conversation, e.g. "tu vai à praia?" (correct would be "tu vais à praia?" and generally we'd omit "tu" [you] because it adds no useful information)
- Many Brazilians seemingly think "mas" (but) and "mais" (more) are the same word because they pronounce it similarly and thus end up using "mais" for everything, even in writing
- Different usage of pronouns, e.g. "eu dou-lhe" in PT vs "eu lhe dou" in BR (or worse, "eu dou a você" - sounds like caveman language plus "você" is considered rude in PT)
Vocabulary differences make for some really funny misunderstandings sometimes though. My Brazilian neighbor's kid was really confused and scared when she was told she needed to "levar uma pica" (get a shot, as in an injection/vaccine) - in Brazil this same sentence means "take a dick". I hadn't laughed that hard in a long time.
Looking at your examples:
- Brazilians borrows words from other languages a lot more easily than the Portuguese, especially when the foreign word is shorter. No wonder "time" gets more usage than "equipe".
- "tu" is going to become extinct in Brazil within the next generation or two. People only use first- or third-person conjugation anyway. "Você" is going to be used for making the distinction between the actual subject of the sentence, and coloquially people just say "cê", which is just as short as "tu", so I don't see it surviving for long.
- Disagree on "Mas/mais". Yes, it is true that a lot of people make this mistake or (worse) don't even know the distinction, but this type of error is equivalent to English "they're/their/there": there is no redundancy or efficiency, so I don't see why the language would change here.
- "dou-lhe", "lhe dou": also going to be extinct due to the redundancy with propositions. You (and I) may not like the "caveman language", but it's undeniably more efficient to just throw verb + proposition + person than to deal with different pronouns.
Nowadays there is still some prejudice but the vast majority of people does not have any issues with Brazilians and, unless you are unlucky enough to run into some asshole, you'll probably not notice it at all. Kids care even less about these things so your kids are very unlikely to be bullied in school or anything like that.
In fact, my partner is originally from Brazil and her family moved here when she was 13. She always had friends, never really felt discriminated against, and is now sitting next to me working on her PhD thesis. The rest of her family loves it here too.
So I would say if you want to move here, go for it! Boa sorte :)
In the Carioca accent, mas and mais have the same pronunciation (“maish” with the s chiado) so it’s easy to confuse one for the other. This has to do with the Carioca tendency to “change” (there’s a linguistic term but I forget) certain vowels. Nós is pronounced “noish”, gas “gaish” and Petrobras “Petrobraish”.
I guess the mas/mais confusion carries over in writing albeit being incorrect.
This does not happen in thr Paulista accent or most other accents I know.
And I've also heard from Portuguese that they find Brazilians easier to understand than some of their own compatriots, especially now that telenovelas have spread Brazilian vocabulary in Portugal.
In the late 80's & 90's Portugal started importing TV programs from Brazil. Since the 2000's this happens much less, but that has been replaced by a large number of Brazilian immigrants settling in Portugal.
As far as I can tell there are no equivalent influences going in the other direction, so Brazilians are rarely exposed to Portuguese pronunciation.
Not anything that bothers me, just a curiosity of global remote work and our R.
"correct pronunciation" to me, in terms of names, roughly means the pronunciation that that person grew with (so it's about where they're from).
And one key difference is the said Portuguese R. It’s trickier than Samuel variations. I think a lot of people would not understand what my name is at all if I pronounce it the way we do it in Brazil.
If it's about Rs, I worked on an oil rig with a Mexican guy named Javier. The American OIM had such hard time telling "Javier" (with the two different gutturals) on the tannoy, Javier got called "George" for the rest of our stay.
You very, very quickly get used to introducing yourself in a way that people from that country can pronounce. It’s really not a big deal.
> A name is not a word, is a sound we associate with our selves.
All words are just sounds we arbitrarily associate with various concepts; names are not special in this sense. (In fact, in some languages, the word for “name” and “noun” are the same).
Like every other word, names follow the phonological and phonotactic rules of the language they’re part of. There’s a reason English has John and Spanish has Juan.
There's the quintessentially, native-English-speaking pronunciation of José with a hard J. With Spanish, the J is obviously silent, or extremely soft, but in Brazilian Portuguese (I can't speak for other forms), you pronounce it almost like someone reading the name for the first time in English, with the hard J.
And then you have the opposite with the name Roberto, in Spanish the R is hard and present (and easy for native-English-speakers), but in Portuguese, the R has that same soft J sound that Spanish speakers use on José.
It's fun how these (three) languages intertwine.
Spanish is extremely rich in pronunciation variations, due to the large population spread over several continents, so in most cases when you observe something about "Spanish" you need to focus on a specific region or dialect, for the observation to have a proper context.
I would be very surprised if the "Spanish J" is silent anywhere; the person you're replying to almost certainly just made a mistake.
I’m a native English speaker and I find those extremely difficult to distinguish. But the French r is fine. (I spoke French to a near-native level 15 years ago; it’s probably decayed to “advanced intermediate” by now).
There are some cases like "halar" / "jalar" but I don't think I've seen the name "Hosé" before. :-)
In other accents, the tip of the tongue is used in the same fashion as in Spanish. This is especially present in border regions.
In other regions, that R is a single hit of the tip of the tongue, especially around Italian and German colony regions, similar to what a single R in the middle of a word typically sounds in Portuguese.
As another speaker pointed out, the J in José is not silent or nearly-silent in Spanish. It is a sound that doesn't exist in mainstream English, but is most close to the English "h" sound.
All languages have their own beauty but there's something special about Brazilian Portuguese - the flow, the "sing-song'y" nature of it, it's almost like a dance. Admittedly I am biased, but I've heard similar from people without the background.
When you say "Loch Ness" with a very thick Scottish accent, the "ch" in loch is quite close to it.
Also the sound is quite common in other languages: "roi" in French, "reisen" in German, ... Even some Spanish dialects like Galego have the same r. Only Castilian/normal Spanish doesn't have it.
OTOH, just ask a Brazilian to pronounce simply "the". The "th" phoneme is quite hard for Portuguese speakers.
Better yet, ask a native from Rio to pronounce any word with a mute "t" or "d". It's hilarious. "Brad Pit" becomes "brahdjee peetchee".
Hardcore: Rardjee-Core
Armlock: Army-locky
I think this is very much standard all over Brazil. It's a common pattern in a large amount of english words, I think most or all of us can pronounce it correctly, but we don't because it'd be harder say and recognize while trying to pronounce it like an american almost sounds like pedantry here.
You mean about the "mispronunciation"? Because the j in "bradhjee" I hear mostly in southeastern accents, where people in Northeast says it more closely with how it's spoken in English.
You are opening a can of worms here considering that Galego is officialy a language, not a dialect, and it's basically very very similar to Portoguese, up to a point in which a galician colleague of mine, when we were at a conference in the USA would talk in Galego with a couple of Brazilian guys and they talked to him in Brazilian Portoguese and they went along just fine. Modern galego and portugues stem from the same root[1]
True, you are right. I stand corrected.
The difference between a language and a dialect is often just politics.
Indeed! It can be defined by loosing or winning a war. If you win, it's a language; if you loose, it's a dialect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
https://i.imgur.com/lBEU5Zk.png
It's very funny to watch this in Portuguese because the word he uses is "morte", and he looks very stupid putting the tongue out after saying "morte".
However the author does acknowledge that his knowledge is focused on Brasil, so there is that.
My first time in Portugal was a mess — I couldn’t understand anything. There were a few words I kept hearing people say that got me really mixed up: “Morrer” (to die) sounds a lot like “Mujer” (woman) in Spanish, whereas “Morar” (to live) sounds a lot like “Morir” (to die).
The Brazilian R is very variable as the article points out but often it is closer to an H than to an R and sometimes this is even true when Brazilians speak English;-)
See also Fjölnir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_(programming_lang..., where the program usually seems to end with "GRUNNUR". My understanding is that this is basically just the name of a standard library package "ground", but screaming GRUNNUR at the end of a program feels like something out of an issue of Heavy Metal.
- American English uses the r flap for the letters t and d between vowels. I think I may have also heard Australians do this?
- I've heard Puerto Ricans when speaking Spanish do something close to what is described as a "Brazilian R". A /x/ type of sound where /r/ would be in other accents. Backed up here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_Spanish#Feature...
I think it's more constrained than this; I don't have it in "baton", for example. I'm no phonologist, but I suspect it has to be followed by a liquid (L or R sound). I have it in e.g. "butter" or "little".
Once I recall I pronounced a drawn out /d/ when cold and startled, and a friend commented that I "rolled my D" and it was weird.
The flap is [ɾ].
In any case, as the sister comment says, the point is that in order to learn the rolling r (consciously, as an older person) you have to notice the flap, and repeated flapping can transfer into the rolled r. So, yes, you learn the flap first, but few people start out saying "I wish I could flap my rs," instead they're looking to learn how to roll them.
I think I sometimes only do it if I'm talking fast. Pronouncing it as [t] isn't often outside the acceptable range, or something that makes you sound too foreign.
> Pronouncing it as [t] isn't often outside the acceptable range, or something that makes you sound too foreign.
I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure someone pronouncing the /t/ in "butter", "little", etc. as [t] would make me very confident that they weren't American.
I was born in Washington DC to a family that had recent roots all over Europe. And had some young interest and exposure to Spanish. I'm American, but my accent is a little all over the place.
I don't get much grief over this in the northeast, but on the west coast people are pretty confused by the way I talk.
My mom would always try to correct my pronunciation of “Latin”, “mountain”, and similar words with a /t/ realized as a glottal stop.
She’s from the East Coast, so indeed, maybe that pronunciation isn’t as common there.
Same goes for other words that end in "t" + unstressed "en," e.g. "fatten," "batten."
Furthermore, it's extremely false to claim that either of these sounds is exclusive or nearly so to American English; they are present in many languages, including but not limited to various dialects of European languages, and also including Mandarin, which has several times more native speakers than Am.E. does.
I've always found alveolar trills more aesthetically pleasing, but you casually drop them in English conversation and you get weird looks and questions.
Question for the peanut gallery: what the heck is the difference between the voiced alveolar approximant and the r-colored vowel, ɝ, (schwa plus hook)? They have different IPA so presumably they have distinct pronunciation, but I cannot hear a difference, nor can I feel a difference in my tongue placement when I say them.
Also, curse HN's lack of unicode support. ~~I think it's related to MySql's stupid utf8 is actually utf8mb3 thing~~. I think they rendered? I see it in my comment after posting, but they are blank squares in the text form.
Singular - hey-ow
Plural - hey-I.
They're spelled real and reals respectively.
hey-I on the plural doesn't make a lot of sense to me, you are probably not hearing something she is saying.
I think I've never heard anybody pronounce 'reais' without the sound of s at the end, are you sure she doesn't say it? It's probably something like hey-eyes (hey-eye-shh for cariocas)
But never as the english word 'rat'. For us it sounds like 'rrrrrrrat', because the 'r' is too long in the pronunciation.
Summarizing: Portuguese don't use long 'r' phonemes when the word starts with 'r'. We usually pronounce as if the word starts with 'h' in english.
The long 'r' is used when 'r' or 'rr' appears in the middle of the words.
The linked article acknowledges this at the end
Either I didn't understand what you mean or I have never seen any Portuguese native speaker (including me) pronouncing it like you say we do.
It appears that appending "r" sounds was once a marker for "posh" status in England, and adopted by the middle class as an attempt at upward mobility. But they went overboard, and added Rs the posh wouldn't. Arguably, it was initially done in mockery, but the mocked missed the joke. I don't know any way to test that hypothesis.
But as far as I know it's due to the colonization of the islands with both Portuguese people and people from the low countries.
As an anecdote, to kick off discussion, I, as a native European Portuguese speaker, that was born in France (moved to Portugal when I was 4), can _barely_ pronounce them correctly.
Not all R's have the same roll of the tongue. They're usually in the middle of the word. Hate those R's.