Question about learning a different language? See details...

I taught my girl to do this the other day!!! I was trying to teach her how to say some French words.

Take the tip of your tongue and have it vibrate (whist saying the word) at the back of your upper teeth, not the middle of the roof of your mouth.

Try it now and let me know if it worked (or, if the above made any sense).

Fucking hell. Sorry, about the typos. It’s late and I really should be in bed.

The best way to learn a language is to get into the country where it’s spoken and be forced to learn it outta necessity.

It’s like martial arts. You can be a black belt all you want, but if you never actually faught anyone, your knowledge and experience is quite limited.

But yea I’m one o dem ghetto people so I denno what I’m talking about.

@jmah: I’ve rolled my r’s on my alveolar ridge since I learned how to talk. Why are you telling her not to?

@La_chica_gomela That’s how I do it. When she tried rolling her r’s on her alveolar ridge, it didn’t quite work. She then did it at the back of her teeth and it worked just fine.

@jmah: I see! Then hey, might work!

@jmah Its not coming out quite the way it’s supposed to. It’s not as purrrrr like as I’d hoped. I wonder what my fiancé is thinking. He’s in bed and probably listening to me, thinking “What the…”

@ItalianPrincess1217 Haha, okay. Maybe, @La_chica_gomela can help you, then. :)

One thing that helps my students (you’re probably not going to like this, but here goes) is to get louder. I guess when more air is being forced through the space, maybe it’s easier to do the trill at first.

There’s not much else I can do for you over the internet. I usually work with them to just tap first, instead of the arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr r’s we have in English, that probably doesn’t even make sense. Anyways. Best of luck!

@jmah: Your last answer just came up. You flatter me!

Also @ItalianPrincess1217: You said it’s not coming out like you wanted. Can you describe what it is coming out like?

Maybe I’m doomed to be a non-tongue-roller forever! :(

RRRRRrrrrrruffles have RRRRRrrrridges! Again….

@La_chica_gomela Ok I’ll try that! Maybe I should wait until
morning before loudly purring. LOL. Umm it sounds like my tongue is flopping up and down too slow. That’s the best I can describe it. It’s pretty ridiculous sounding. <<<Blushing>>>

It usually goes pretty slow at first, you might be doing it right and just need more practice. I wish I could hear it to tell you.

I also found this video. I have no idea how well that would work because I don’t really remember first learning to do it, and I’ve never taught a student this but hey, it might help. There were a lot of positive comments. It moves really slowly though. Don’t even watch the beginning, just start it at Minute 1.

I usually have my students practice by saying a word, too, like perro or guerra, (I speak Spanish), but I don’t really know if it helps. Heck, try it both ways!

@La_chica_gomela That video actually helped a bit (even though the guy is ubber annoying). I’m starting to get the hang of it! Thanks! Or should I say grazie! :)

@ItalianPrincess1217: I am so glad! De nada!
(Yeah, he really was! I wanted to slap him, and be like “No one cares! Just explain the thing!”)

Brain wiring of fine motor skills (like the muscles that control our tongues) is very natural for babies when they learn their first language. It gets harder as we get older. Still, even at the age of 8 a child can learn how to ride a bike. An adult can still learn to swim. Most of us learn how to drive a car. Even at the age of 50 or 70 one can learn to play the piano. But it requires more effort.

The easiest sounds are “a” and “m” and they are present in every language in the world and we are talking thousands of languages here. The easy sounds are usually among the first for a baby to pick up. Then they progress to less common somewhat more difficult sounds like “n” or “b”. The “r” sounds belong to one of the most difficult sounds that exist. The article below will explain all the details.

You can learn and speak Italian without ever having to master the alveolar trill. The good news is there’s only one phoneme, so no ambiguities. The Italians will understand you.

“The alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is [r]. It is informally and commonly called the rolling R or rolled R. Quite often, /r/ is used in phonemic transcriptions (especially those found in dictionaries) of languages like English and German that have rhotic consonants that are not an alveolar trill. This is partly due to ease of typesetting and partly because <r> is often the symbol used for the orthographies of such languages.

In the majority of Indo-European languages, this sound is at least occasionally allophonic with an alveolar tap [ɾ], particularly in unstressed positions. Exceptions to this include Catalan, Spanish, and Albanian, which treat them as separate phonemes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_trill

@ItalianPrincess1217: So, any updates for us?

I’ve been practicing! Although I can’t continuously roll my tongue, I can fake it pretty well while pronouncing words.