How to Roll Your R's, Step-by-Step [Spanish Pronunciation]

These are real comments I've gotten from people on social media. Don't let the lack of the ability to do the rrrr stop you from learning Spanish. You can learn, and in this video I'm going to show you how. Rolling your R is not easy, but it is doable. Almost everybody is physically capable of doing it. It just probably takes a lot more practice than you expected. So the first thing to know is don't expect to learn fast. Go into this with the expectation that it's going to take you three or six months of regular practice to get it. That way, if it happens sooner, you'll be pleasantly surprised. And if it doesn't, you won't kick yourself about it. And you'll just be patient with yourself, which is a really good principle to live by in general when it comes to your Spanish. So in this video, you're going to learn the difference between the two R sounds in Spanish. You're going to learn why you might be struggling with them in the first place. And you're going to learn a step-by-step way for learning how to roll your R's. The actual R sound that you're thinking of. So the first question is, when do I use the single R versus the rolled R? And it's relatively straightforward. When the R falls between two vowels, as in corazon, coraje, or pera, that R is just a quick little tap. It's not rolled, not drilled. When the R comes before or after a consonant, that's part of the same syllable, as in barco, tren, libro, gracias, fresa. And so on. These are all words where the R and the consonant are part of the same syllable. And we have the tapped R at the end of words, as in amor, tener, color, and so on. You'll use the double R sound when a word starts with an R, as in radio, rodilla, or rojo, or when you see two R's next to one another, as in jarra, arriba, or agarrar. And lastly, you use the double R when it comes after a consonant, but it's a new syllable, as in sonreir, enriquecer, or alrededor. The next question you're probably wondering, and the reason you're even watching this video in the first place is, you probably can't roll your R's right now. So why is that? Why do you struggle with rolling your R's? And I think there are several reasons. The first of which doesn't have anything to do with the R. I've found that when you say certain letters, certain consonants in particular, the English way, rather than the Spanish way, it's a lot harder to say the Spanish R. Let's take the letter T, for example, as in tres, tres. I talked about this in another video related to pronunciation, but the letter T in Spanish isn't quite the same. So we say tomato, but in Spanish it's tomate, tomate. In the Spanish version, you don't feel air coming out of your mouth when you say tomate, and that's because your tongue is against the back of the front of your teeth. Tomate, tomate, rather than t, t, tomate. If you try to say tres, tres, with the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, like we say in English, train, train, and you try to roll your R, it's really difficult. I can't really do it. Tren, tren. But if you put your tongue in the Spanish T position against your back of your teeth, t, t, t, tren, it's a lot easier to then roll your R. Tren, tres, triste, and so on. I find this also happens with the L and the D. The L in English is flat against the roof of your mouth. In Spanish, it's more with the tip of your tongue. So if you try to say alrededor with your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth, it's really, really hard. Alrededor. If instead you use the tip of your tongue to say the L, it's a much easier transition to the R. Alrededor. Or with the letter D, for example, the English D is a lot harder than the Spanish D. So if you take a name like Pedro, Pedro, and try and pronounce it with the English D, Pedro, Pedro, and then roll your R, Pedro, Pedro, it's really, really hard. If instead you use the Spanish D, Pedro, Pedro, Pedro. That's very soft. Rolling your R, again, it's a lot easier of a transition to the R sound with your tongue. A lot of this comes down to building a little bit of an awareness of what your tongue does in your mouth in order to produce certain sounds. By the way, if you're finding this helpful and you want more tips to improve your pronunciation in Spanish, you might like the pronunciation guide that I put together. It's free. It's called 8 Keys to Natural Spanish Pronunciation, and it even includes a little audio walkthrough. You can grab it for free at the link in the description below. The next reason why you might be struggling to roll your R's is that you're trying too hard. You can't force your tongue to actually make the sound itself. It happens when air passes over your tongue in a very specific way. So if you try and actually force your tongue to tap over and over, it's not going to happen. It's kind of like trying to sleep in that the more that you try to do it, the farther away it seems. The first thing you need to do then is sort of relax your tongue a bit. If you've watched any other videos on rolling your R, you've probably heard this advice before, and it's because it's important. But it's not the whole story. In a minute, I'll show you exactly what to do. The next reason why you might be struggling to roll your R's is because you're trying to say actual words. Instead of saying guitarra or carro, we need to isolate the sound itself because there's just too much going on when we're trying to say a word or even a whole phrase with R's in it. What we want to do is eliminate all the other variables and just take the R part and then even remove the R part and just use air, not our vocal cords at all. And that brings me to this seven step process that'll help you start rolling your R's. The first step is to make the tap sound, the sound that's in perro, perra, carro, cara, and so on. That is a sound that you're familiar with. It's the same sound that exists in words like butter, better, letter, ladder. Our tongue flaps against the roof of our mouth just once. Butter, better. You want to take that sound from better, ladder, letter and isolate it. Better, adder, and stick it into a Spanish word like cara, cara. If it helps, you can picture a T or two T's there or even a D instead of an R. As in catalog or madam. That adder sound is what we want for cara, cara. Next, we want to try to remove our vocal cords from the equation and just say adder without letting noise come out, but instead just breathing out from our lungs. As in adder, adder. The next step is really just to repeat. You want to be able to make this sound over and over and over again every day. You go into it with that mindset of like, all right, every day when I'm in the shower or cooking dinner, I'm going to just kind of like while I'm chopping onions, go adder, adder, adder. And while you're doing this, eventually your tongue is going to do a little bit of a double tap, a little bit of a... That is if you focus on just shooting air from your lungs over the top of your tongue. So starting with the tip of your tongue kind of loose, but pointing towards the roof of your mouth going adder, adder. And then again, slowly over time, it'll start to vibrate a little bit more. And eventually it'll kind of click. If it doesn't, you need to one, keep practicing. Two, change positions. Do it laying on your back. Do it while you're driving. Do it while you're jogging. Anything to change up the position of your body, the things that are going on with your vocal cords and your lungs, anything to kind of shake you into a new way of producing this sound. It'll kind of start with a... Before it goes into the roll. But once you can reliably go... You can start to add in like a humming sound or basically any nonsensical noise so that you don't have the interference of trying to think of a Spanish word while you're saying it. Just doing that over and over. Then you can try sticking it into a Spanish word like guitarra or perro or carro. The last step is to keep practicing, but on different words that also have the same rolled R sound. So we talked earlier about the three main situations where you roll your R versus tapping it. When the word starts with an R, when there's two R's in between two vowels, or when the R is after a consonant, part of a new syllable. So these are all kind of new movements for your tongue and it pays to practice them all. So if you can say a word like guitarra, then try to move on to words that start with the rolled R sound like rojo, rojo. If you're struggling with it, push air out from your lungs to produce that sound initially, rojo, rojo, rojo. The trickiest R sound, or the one that took me the longest anyway, is the R sound that comes after a consonant and is part of a new syllable. As in sonreir, el restaurante, or alrededor. What was helpful for me was to add a bit of air. The word alrededor sticks with me because it was a really long while before I could say it. And I had to say alrededor and really force air out of my mouth after the L. And remember, if you have your L in the right spot for the Spanish L, as in with the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, rather than flat against your mouth, it makes it a lot easier. One last tip, which is kind of related to this one in the sense of separating the sounds, I got from a video from Elisa Dallara several years ago, and I remembered it in the course of making this video. And what she suggested was basically separating the two sounds in a word like carro, carro, and instead of trying to say them all at once, put a little gap there between car and ro, or per and ro, because you know how to do the tapped R. So you can just say perro, perro, or carro, carro, and if you sort of add a burst of air between the two sounds, as in carro, carro, carro, eventually you'll kind of start to roll them and your brain will want to squeeze the two sounds together. And eventually those two sounds will come all the way together to form that nice carro, perro, or guitarra. All right. So you're aware of some of the reasons why rolling your R's are difficult. You've got a step-by-step way to give it a shot and practice it. Now you need to actually put in lots of practice on a daily basis. Pick a time every day when you're stuck in traffic or taking a shower, anything that you do every day where you've got some privacy, and just go through the steps that we went through in this video to practice it. And if you do, and if anything that I've shared here works for you, let me know in the comments. I would love to know. Or if there's anything else that you have found that works for you, if this didn't work for you, but something else did, let me know in the comments too. That way anybody watching this can read the comments section and get some more tips to finally start rolling their R's in the way that they want. And if you want to keep working on your pronunciation, check out this video next. That's it for now. Thanks for watching.