Thread: Rolling the "Р" (R sound) - important, or not?

Thanks Throbert for all the info and exercises, that should keep me busy for quite some time!

I have discovered I can roll the R better after a glass of red wine - sadly not practical on a full-time basis

Lampada - I don't know enough Russian to understand the videos, sorry.

Originally Posted by Lindsay

I have discovered I can roll the R better after a glass of red wine - sadly not practical on a full-time basis

Hah!

As I said, I used to practice the Eddy Teddy Freddy chant while I was jogging in college -- and vigorous cardiovascular exercise that tires you out can have the same "tongue-loosening" effect as a glass of wine! So, keep practicing, and I'm sure you'll get it sooner or later. But it's not the end of the world if you can't do it -- the important thing is to grasp that ра рэ ры ро ру and ря ре ри рё рю have DIFFERENT "r" sounds, and that in general you understand the difference between "hard" and "soft" consonants in Russian.

P.S. Lampada's videos were examples of native-speaking Russian children having difficulty with the hard-R / soft-R distinction -- so no worries that you couldn't understand the videos, because they weren't models that you should be trying to imitate as a foreign learner.

P.P.S. Difficulty with the trilled "r" sounds is so common that there's a special Russian word for it: картавить, which means "to pronounce the R sound incorrectly". It's analogous to English "lisp", meaning "to pronounce the S sound incorrectly."

P.P.P.S. If you can't trill your "r", then the next best thing is flapping the "r" -- a "flap" is when you make the "r" sound a bit like "d", but ONLY ONCE -- imagine a Victorian orator doing that with the "r" in "heroic" or "historic." This wikipedia article about "flap" consonants provides the Spanish example of pero ("but", "но") and perro ("dog", "пёс"). In Spanish, the single "r" is flapped; the double "rr" is trilled/rolled. And the wikipedia article also makes the point that in the normal American pronunciation of words like "fatter" and "butter", the "tt" is actually pronounced as a "flapped R".