How to Roll Your Rs

Submitted for your approval on September 3rd, 2006 by Tortuga.
Found in: Spanish tips.

© Laszlo Harri Nemeth, nlharri@freemail.hu,
http://nlharri.freebase.hu/

Okay, so you are quickly learning a few choice Spanish phrases to get around in Akumal Mexico for a couple of weeks. Your very own crash course. And you need some shortcuts to learning Spanish.

What is the best way to learn Spanish quickly? There are a couple well known tips for learning some Spanish fast so that you can communicate to Mexicans on the Riviera Maya.

These are good tips on their own for learning Spanish quickly, but they are common tips. One of them we are going to challenge and provide a tip you have never heard before.

• Don’t try to learn complicated conjugations, try to learn Spanish phrases that you can use frequently.
• Don’t feel like you have to say every word in Spanish … Mix English in with your Spanish when you don’t know how to say a particular Spanish word.

The Mexicans will probably understand and will be very forgiving. In fact, many Mexicans are trying to learn English themselves, so an occasional English word thrown out benefits them, too. And the third common tip:

• When it comes to pronunciation, if you don’t know how to roll your Rs, just pronounce your “Rs” normally.

Like I said, these are well known tips. When learning Spanish quickly, you don’t want to waste your time learning how to speak Spanish perfectly. You want to get by well enough that you can get some important ideas across while you are on your Riviera Maya Akumal vacation.

But I would like to challenge the third common tip. Even if you can’t roll your Rs, I have a method which you can use that will cause you to at least sound like you are rolling your rs, instead of having to resort to pronouncing your Rs as in English. As a result, your communication will be much clearer and more understandable.

When tackling a new foreign language, why get bogged down with the most difficult part of pronouncing Spanish? Don’t risk becoming a tentative speaker. With this tip, you can start speaking Spanish right away with confidence and not worry so much about those pesky Rs.

Editor’s note: If you want to start speaking a lot of Spanish quickly with an easy to use, practical method, try Synergy Spanish. We have used this program and we can attest that it will have you communicating in Spanish fast — not just vocabulary, this program will have you speaking complicated sentences in Spanish quickly.

It is a unique, fun method using the SYNERGY VERB + BRICK VERB + MORTAR WORD formula, and by learning only 138 Spanish words, it will get you far in a short amount of time. We highly endorse it for a quick-and-easy way to learn Spanish.

Best way to learn Spanish

What I would like to challenge here is tip #3. Proper pronunciation is a major key for your Spanish listener to understand the Spanish phrases you have learned. What you don’t want to do is to waste your few available hours of learning time on drills trying to learn how to roll your Rs. Efficient use of your time is the key here. But simply resorting to pronouncing your “Rs” as in English really drops your Spanish down many notches in terms of being understandable.

“Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.” Christopher Morley

When I was learning Spanish for the first time only a few months before moving down to Akumal Mexico, my biggest stumbling block was rolling my “Rs”. It was such a problem that all of my Spanish suffered, because I was so self-conscious of rolling my “Rs”. I would resort to countless drills of just rolling my “Rs”. Eventually, I mastered it. But I had months of studying Spanish.

What if you only have a week or two? Maybe you have months before your Mexican vacation, but you simply don’t have the time to be practicing Spanish. Your time studying Spanish has to be quality time and extremely focused and efficient. And you probably don’t have time to run through drills to practice what you’ve learned. You need to learn Spanish easy.

If you are like me, learning how to roll your Rs would not only slow the pace of your comprehension down, but it would have a psychological affect that would make you less confident of speaking Spanish. As a result, when you speak, you are gun shy and stumble through phrases.

Just speaking your “Rs” the old English way certainly is a shortcut but at the expense of making it harder for your Spanish listeners to understand what you are saying.

Learn Spanish easy

I am going to give you a tip that you have probably never heard before. You won’t read it in a Spanish book. You won’t be taught this in a Spanish class because it’s not “proper”. It’s a great trick for spitting out those troublesome rolls. When you use this method, your pronunciation comes across to your Spanish listeners as if you had just rolled an “R”, but you don’t have to spend hours or days doing drills, you already know how to say it.

Editor’s note: It is always better to roll your Rs properly, but use this tip to start speaking Spanish quickly in public while you practice rolling your Rs properly in private. Don’t let the most difficult part of pronouncing Spanish for English-speakers keep you from communicating in Spanish right away.

Here’s the trick of how to roll your Rs: whenever you come across an “R” in Spanish, say it like the hard consonant “D”. That’s it. It’s that easy. It’s an aural trick. Spoken fast enough, the “D” sounds like you rolled an “R” really fast.

So, an example. Let’s say you’ve learned a mandatory Spanish phrase for traveling to Akumal in the Riviera Maya Mexico. A term you will want to use at a restaurant. Let’s say can’t finish eating your delicious whole fish and want to take the rest back to your Akumal villa and eat it as a midnight snack. The phrase, “para llevar” is what you want to say to the waiter. It means “to go”. Literally, “for to go”. The waiter comes to your table and you say, “Para llevar, por favor.” That’s a lot of Rs to roll to say a simple but frequently-used restaurant phrase “to go, please”.

Let’s see how you would say that in Spanish. Basic knowledge of Spanish pronunciation is required here. It’s not hard, but you need to know how to pronounce the Spanish vowels, especially. That’s a huge key to being understood. One of the great things about the Spanish language is that vowels are spoken consistently, always with the same pronunciation. That’s what makes Spanish easy as compared to other languages (like English). The hard part of Spanish pronunciation is learning how to roll your rs. In our example phrase, remember, the double-L “ll” is pronounced like the English “y”.

Here we go. Rewriting “para llevar, por favor” just to emphasize how we will pronounce our rs … is now “pada llevad, pod favod”. Remember, you have to pronounce the vowels correctly for it to sound right! And that double-L, too. It sounds fine slow, but say it fast, and it sounds just like you really know how to roll your rs.

Editor’s note: For a more complete program to master the Spanish language, try Rocket Spanish. With its 12 hours of interactive audio lessons, conversation coursebook, and audio-supported grammar book, it will take you from a beginner to advanced Spanish speaker in an easy to follow, step by step program, with easy-to-listen-to audio files.

This is a well rounded program that is not monotonous and repetitous like so many Spanish textbooks that are overblown with hard-to-grasp grammar and lists of meaningless words. The female speaker in the audio lessons has the most pleasant voice we have ever heard in a Spanish audio program.

Advanced little-known secret Spanish pronunciation tip

Even if you’ve heard that little tip on how to roll your rs somewhere before, I bet you haven’t heard this one. Here’s my advanced little known secret to increase the quality of the Spanish pronunciation of your rs even more.

The advanced tip to rolling your Rs: Say the soft English “R” — but not completely — followed by the hard English “D”.

Do not over-pronounce the “R” — do not bring a lot of attention to it — say it as softly as possible. Instead of saying the “R” like at the end of “car” or “bar”, say it like the “R” in “parker” or “barter”, where you don’t entirely “follow-through” with the “R” as you instead slur it into the next consonant.

So, spelling it out, you would say: “parda llevard, pord favord”

To summarize how to roll your Rs. Method one: say Spanish “Rs” like the hard consonant “D”. Method two: say Spanish “Rs” like the English “D” but with just a hint of the English “R” before it.

Don’t let the length of this article fool you. There are ways you can learn Spanish easy, and this is one of them. To be quickly rolling your Rs in moments rather than days or weeks, use method 1 or 2 in this tip and you will be well on your way to being understandable when you speak Spanish, the easy way.

Check out these tips and articles…

• Akumal Tip #038 - Top 5 free resources for learning Spanish quickly

• Empañadas de Queso Crema (Mayan Cream Cheese Empanadas)

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