# How to transition from [ɾɾɾɾ] to [r]?



## Seeda

I intend to start learning Spanish in the near future but I'm having an incredibly hard time pronouncing [r] properly. It's been at least ten years since I first tried and I haven't made an _inch_ of progress since. The closest I can get to it is by making a series of short [ɾ]'s in rapid succession but they're nowhere near fast enough to even resemble an actual [r]. I looked through dozens and dozens of different methods on how to roll my R's and this is what I gathered from them:

1. The tip of the tongue has to be touching the alveolar ridge, which is the part of the palate that bulges out a little right before the front teeth.
2. The tongue must not be stiff; it must be loose and relaxed so as to move freely when producing an [r].
3. The [r] sound has to be produced by vibrating the tongue. How the vibration itself occurs is hazy to me, though. Most sources claim it's done through the airstream causing the tongue to vibrate but others say the tongue can vibrate independently.

So what I need to know is how I get my tongue to vibrate fast enough so my weird [ɾɾɾɾ] becomes a proper [r]. If you can trill your R's perfectly, can you tell me what difference you notice when you're pronouncing [ɾɾɾɾ] and when you're pronouncing [r]? And if said difference is merely speed of the tongue-tapping, can you pinpoint how you get your tongue to tap your palate faster?

Trilling R's has been the bane of my life and it'd mean the world to me if you could help me with that. Thanks so much.


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## Nino83

Seeda said:


> Most sources claim it's done through the airstream causing the tongue to vibrate but others say the tongue can vibrate independently.


When pronouncing [r] and [rr] (in Italian) I think you need some airflow. Without air the tongue doesn't vibrate. 


Seeda said:


> can you tell me what difference you notice when you're pronouncing [ɾɾɾɾ] and when you're pronouncing [r]?


If you record your [ɾɾɾɾ] maybe I can tell you which is the difference but without hearing it I don't know what to say.
The [ɾ] sound is by definition a single tap, so I'm a bit confused when I read [ɾɾɾɾ].


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> The [ɾ] sound is by definition a single tap, so I'm a bit confused when I read [ɾɾɾɾ].


I think he is trying to emulate the trill by a rapid succession of taps. Needless to say that this won't work.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> a rapid succession of taps


Ah, ok.
Yes, if it is so, it doesn't work. The trill is a single continuous sound (like that of a fricative), not a sequence of single taps.


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## Seeda

Sorry, I can record myself but I can't upload the recording anywhere due to Internet connection issues at the moment.


Nino83 said:


> The trill is a single continuous sound (like that of a fricative), not a sequence of single taps.


But at what point do you consider it to be 'continuous'? This video shows how the tongue moves when producing [r]. Call me silly, but I can't for the life of me see a difference between that and a very rapid succession of short [ɾ]'s — I can be and probably am wrong but that's the impression I got. I feel like it's almost what I'm doing when trying to say [r], but my tongue happens to move much, much, much more slowly.


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## Nino83

Seeda said:


> I feel like it's almost what I'm doing when trying to say [r], but my tongue happens to move much, much, much more slowly.


Yes, you're right, Seeda, it's all about speed.  If your tongue moves slowly the sound won't seem continuous.
Try to relax your tongue and throw out more air and, probably, the trill will get faster.
The alveolar trill can be voiceless too. If you will be able to make the trill without voicing, you're making the right movement.
It's like when you make your lips trill (when, for example, you try to reproduce the noise of a car or that of a motorcycle).

There is a video on youtube ("Learn to Trill the Spanish R (Rolling R) - Short & Sweet Version!" ) where a Chinese girl explains how to do it. Maybe it could be interesting for you.


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## berndf

Seeda said:


> But at what point do you consider it to be 'continuous'? This video shows how the tongue moves when producing [r]. Call me silly, but I can't for the life of me see a difference between that and a very rapid succession of short [ɾ]'s — I can be and probably am wrong but that's the impression I got. I feel like it's almost what I'm doing when trying to say [r], but my tongue happens to move much, much, much more slowly.


You are working off the erroneous premise that for a trill you actively move the tongue up and down. It is the streaming air (see #2 where Nino wrote_ I think you need some airflow_) that makes your tongue "flutter". The tongue must be relaxed, otherwise it will never work. I am struggling with a long [rr] myself and my problem is that I don't relax the tongue sufficiently for a prolonged rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Feel how you say rrrrrrrrrrrrr in French. Here it is the back of your tongue that "flutters". It does it all by itself, you do not move it actively up and down.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> You are working off the erroneous premise that for a trill you actively move the tongue up and down.



True. In the trill, the sequence of taps is not made by "active" movements of the tongue, it's the puff of air that makes the tongue trill.
Like when we try to produce the sound of a helicopter making our lips trill.
I think Amy Lin ("Learn to Trill the Spanish R (Rolling R) - Short & Sweet Version!", on youtube) got very well the relation between these two sounds. The mechanism is very similar.


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## Seeda

I've seen the video. It's unfortunately one of those countless methods where someone has come up with their own quirky way of trilling their R's but it only works for them or perhaps a bunch of other people. Being relatively well-versed in linguistics, I favor a more scientific approach, i.e. I try to figure out exactly which parts of the vocal apparatus are involved in the enunciating of the phoneme.


Nino83 said:


> it's the puff of air that makes the tongue trill


That's one of the tricky parts for me. Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that the airstream alone is enough to get the tongue vibrating, as though the brain didn't send any signal whatsoever to the tongue while performing an [r]. A little fact -- When I heard a rolled R for the very first time in my life as a kid, I didn't know it was an R and I just thought to myself, 'Oh, what a weird way of saying L!' It wasn't until some time later that I finally learned it was the way R is pronounced in other languages. But during all the time in between, the false notion that a rolled R is some sort of an L became deeply embedded in my brain, to the point that I can't shake it off to this day despite being fully aware of it. I'm only hypothesizing, by the way, as I don't know anything about neuroscience. You described the tongue vibration as not an "active movement" of the tongue, that's pretty much the same thing I'm talking about in terms of "brain signals". At this point I have a precise idea of what's going on during the pronouncing of a trill, I just can't reproduce it because my brain is not sending the right signals to my vocal apparatus.


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## berndf

Seeda said:


> Being relatively well-versed in linguistics, I favor a more scientific approach


But it seems you are not aware of the physics that produces a _trill_. A trill is low frequency oscillation (something like 3-5Hz) of the tongue that is produced by asserting a defined pressure at the point of production that is strong enough to cause this oscillation but at the same time the tongue has to be relaxed enough to produce a low frequency. If you stiffen the tongue it will produce too high a frequency that does not result in the desired resonance. You also need sufficient air pressure for the resonance to be strong enough it makes your tongue "flutter".

As a French speaker you should have no problem producing a uvular trill [R] (an Edith Piaf _r_). Just feel what you are doing there and try to do the same with the tip rather than with the back of your tongue.


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## Nino83

Seeda said:


> Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that the airstream alone is enough to get the tongue vibrating, as though the brain didn't send any signal whatsoever to the tongue while performing an [r].


It is possible and the sound is this.
If one is not able to produce a voiceless trill, he cannot produce a voiced one. For example, the girl of the video on youtube can make long unvoiced trills.
As you can hear from the audio file, the unvoiced trill is easily audible, so you're able to hear if you're making the right movements.
It's a matter of exercise.


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## Seeda

Haha well, ten years of exercise haven't worked too good for me  but thanks for your efforts anyway, Nino83.


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## Dan2

berndf said:


> You are working off the erroneous premise that for a trill you actively move the tongue up and down.


Agreed.


Nino83 said:


> In the trill, the sequence of taps is not made by "active" movements of the tongue, it's the puff of air that makes the tongue trill.


Agreed.


Seeda said:


> Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that the airstream alone is enough to get the tongue vibrating, as though the brain didn't send any signal whatsoever to the tongue while performing an [r]


The brain signals the tongue with regard to position in the mouth and tension.  The air flowing over the tongue does the rest.  The up-and-down motion of the tongue-tip in a trill is not actively controlled.

The following may not help you produce a trill but it may convince you that what Nino and Bernd are saying is correct.  When you produce a vowel, any vowel, the vocal cords are opening and closing at a frequency related to the pitch of the vowel.  On the order of 100 openings and closings per second is typical of an adult male; about a 1000 per second for a female singing "high C".  Do you really think the brain is sending a signal to the vocal cords for each opening and closing?  Rather: Assume the cords are closed as you start an airflow from the lungs to begin a vowel; the pressure of air from the lungs pushes the cords apart, allowing a puff of air through, but also relieving the pressure, so the cords start to close, causing pressure to build up, and the cycle repeats.  If you can bring yourself to believe that then you might want to reconsider your statement,


Seeda said:


> Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that the airstream alone is enough to get the tongue vibrating,


The airstream alone is enough to get the vocal cords (*your *vocal cords!) vibrating.  Why not the tongue-tip?
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berndf said:


> A trill is low frequency oscillation (something like 3-5Hz) of the tongue


I agree with everything else you say but I think 3-5 Hz is way off.  I can produce 5 tap+vowel *syllables *per second, and that's nothing like a trill.  My trill is more like 20 vibrations per second.


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## berndf

Dan2 said:


> I agree with everything else you say but I think 3-5 Hz is way off. I can produce 5 tap+vowel *syllables *per second, and that's nothing like a trill. My trill is more like 20 vibrations per second.


I had second thoughts about this number too, but 20Hz is way to high. If you look at a person producing a trilled [r] you can see the tongue moving up and down. At 20Hz that wouldn't be possible any more. Also, a 20Hz vibration should produced a low humming sound at lease children should be able to hear. I have never heard anybody claiming this to happen. Could we agree on about 10Hz? If it interest you I could use a 50fps video camera to record an [r] and count frames; then we know it for sure.


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## Karton Realista

I think that you are trying too hard. Basics of learning how to pronounce other languages is emulating native speakers. I learnt how to pronounce Slovak "h" by singing along to the song "Aby bolo jasné" by Desmod - it contains many h's in its chorus. Why don't you try singing along to Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu? I think it would be 10x better than trying to learn it via a scientific method - you're not a robot, even if you tell yourself "I have to move my tongue here, then here, then blow the air, then whatever", you'll probably still end up failing.


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## Nino83

Karton Realista said:


> Why don't you try singing along to Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu?


Good idea! 
There's a Brazilian woman, living in Italy (she has a good accent), who learnt this sound like this: 
"E com essa música eu treinei o meu erre em italiano, porque como para a gente é dificil fazer [rrrrrr] não é (?), ela tem uma música que diz [vor'rɛi], então eu não conseguia cantando, fazendo [vo'hɛi], [vo'ɾɛi], não conseguia, então, quando tem que treinar o erre, quando eu vou falar um outra palavra, eu volto para o [vor'rɛi]" (speaking of "Vorrei", a song of the Italian singer "Giorgia", you can see the video on youtube, "035 - Bate-papo sobre música italiana ", 6'05"). 
I learned pronouncing foreign languages by singing too.


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## Seeda

Karton Realista said:


> you're not a robot, even if you tell yourself "I have to move my tongue here, then here, then blow the air, then whatever", you'll probably still end up failing.



To each his own, I guess. I can't think of a single foreign phoneme that I learned by simply imitating native speakers. Back at school when I was learning how to pronounce [ʌ] for English, I had a hard time even recognizing that vowel as it sounded to me like an entirely different phoneme depending on a person's voice. Different teachers would say it's a mix between this vowel and that vowel, it's halfway between that and that blah blah blah but that didn't make any sense to me. Then one day I learned that [ʌ] is actually the unrounded pendant to [ɔ], which is a very common vocoid in French, and I immediately figured out how to pronounce it.
Some people can learn new phonemes simply by listening, and that's great, but I'm not one of them. If I were, I would've been able to trill my R's for a long time by now.


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## Sobakus

berndf said:


> I had second thoughts about this number too, but 20Hz is way to high. If you look at a person producing a trilled [r] you can see the tongue moving up and down. At 20Hz that wouldn't be possible any more. Also, a 20Hz vibration should produced a low humming sound at lease children should be able to hear. I have never heard anybody claiming this to happen. Could we agree on about 10Hz? If it interest you I could use a 50fps video camera to record an [r] and count frames; then we know it for sure.


For what it's worth, Audacity's spectrum plot shows my voiceless R to peak at 28Hz.


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## jmx

Seeda said:


> ... I'm having an incredibly hard time pronouncing [r] properly.


Try making "motor sounds" with your mouth. Sooner or later something similar to rrrr will appear.


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## Seeda

Nino83 said:
			
		

> If you record your [ɾɾɾɾ] maybe I can tell you which is the difference but without hearing it I don't know what to say.



I sound like this


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## Nino83

Seeda said:


> I sound like this


Ah, ok, now it's clear.
You're making more [ɾ]'s in a row. It doesn't work.
In order to make a [r] or a [rr], put the tip of your tongue under the alveolar ridge, relax the tongue and throw the air out. Try to concentrate the airflow (compressing it) in the central part of the mouth, against the tongue.
Sooner or later the tongue should start vibrating.


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## Swatters

Seeda, you really should think of a trill as a very special kind of fricative, where the right amount of airflow with the tongue in just the right position causes rhythmic contact of the articulators. It's the air streaming out that triggers the trill not any kind of tongue movement.

It's not fundamentally different from the [ʀ] - [ʁ] - [ʁ̞] alternation in French, really.


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