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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Now, if someone could teach me how to roll my Spanish R's - I've heard that if you don't learn by age 3 you can't but I want to disagree.

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I've heard that if you don't learn by age 3 you can't

Nonsense. I learned to do it long after I was 3.

This might help: put your tongue (but not the tip) just above your teeth, let it relax, then blow air out so your tongue flutters.

I've heard someone explain to me that it's kind of like a flag fluttering in the wind. Except that your tongue is the flag. He recommended that I try to stick the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth and blow out hard - and resist the outward pressure (and the tongue will flutter back rapidly like a flag - the Spanish R vibration) - and once I got that, with time, the amount of pressure needed would relax.

That sounds about right. Only don't take this too literally:

stick the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth

If I do that, it gets stuck. What I think you want is the hard palate (behind the teeth), not the top of the mouth, and keep it relaxed.

I guess I should add that I'm neither a native speaker (though I've studied more than one language with rolled r's) nor have I any experience teaching this skill. I'd bet money you can learn it, though.

Edit: one more thing - you may find it easier to try words that end in a rolled r. The words that begin with a rolled r are a little harder (to me).

Except there are no words in Spanish that end with a rolled r.

Not quite true. If a word ends in an r and the speaker is thinking about what to say next, he may in fact roll the r. Think about this sentence: "Estuvimos allí por... un rato." Often it'd be punctuated with ellipses, but in some sense it might be better written "Estuvimos allí porr un rato."

Also, a lot of native spanish speakers pronounce all initial r's as rolled r's.

That's the way spanish is pronounced.

Radio is "Rradio".

I've found amusing how some people who learn english as a second language end up pronouncing spanish as "espanish", since no spanish word begis with s(consonant), except for sh.

"A lot" meaning all of them, because that's the norm.

Argentinian here... and I'd usually extend the o, not the r, so "Estuvimos allí poor un rato."

I've heard quite my share of Spanish and never happened upon that. Rather, people would extend the r without rolling it.

And in any event, that wouldn't mean there are words in Spanish with rolled final r's, which is what was being discussed, just that people might pronounce a word that way.

nonsense.

Cite one?

You flutter your tongue? I've always used the soft part of my mouth, in the back. Maybe I'm making a different sound though.

Most people who have a hard time rolling their Rs are trying too hard; and it makes their tongue too stiff. Try relaxing your tongue (in other words, make it loose and lazy) and then try to roll your Rs.

I took Spanish all through High School and never managed to get the roll down. Then in my early thirties I was challenged by a friend and in about a week it finally clicked. The problem is, I find it very hard to keep up without practice and it is never flows out naturally.

Really? I speak Spanish so I have the inverse problem; my English pronunciation is funny.

But you can spell "pronunciation", which many english speakers have difficulty doing :)

Thank you :) My spelling is ok (more or less), but my pronunciation is terrible.

Maybe I could do it when I was three, but I definitely learned when I was in my teens.

I learned it accidentally when I was 21. I was making fun of a children cartoon commercial, by repeating it in an Italian mafia boss voice. Lo and behold, the Spanish r came out of nowhere.

I was taught Spanish in second grade (Sacramento district public school system) and can roll the R's just fine - I believe I was 6 or 7 at the time.

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