The Rolling R Review

Imagine one of those dance studios. A wall of mirrors. Lithe dancers, six pack stomachs, firm buttocks and all that brightly coloured, body hugging clothing.

Same idea, a mirrored wall but there's a bloke with a pronounced belly and a red nose, maybe for alcohol, maybe for the sun, sitting, facing the mirrors, on a cheap plastic chair with the sort of posture that Mr Plant would have reprimanded him for as a youth. Every now and then an acrid smell, it may be sweat from Mr Tubby or it may just be the room, wafts through the hot and airless atmosphere. It's Covid time so the fat bloke is wearing a face shield. Sometimes he blows a raspberry, well more or less, sometimes he gets hold of the side of his mouth to try and get his lips to flap in the wind. Gargling sounds. Strangled sounds. Flapping tongues.

It's me and I'm with a speech therapist trying to learn how to do the rolled R that is more or less essential to speak Spanish. Something I haven't mastered in all the time here. The therapist has said four sessions may do it. Maggie says I'm wasting money. I don't care. I've thought about doing this for years. To be honest it didn't go well. I have a video to prove it. Worth a try though and three more sessions to go.

This part I added in August 2020.

It took me a while to get the sound but I can now make it reasonably easily. We'd booked in four sessions but after two and a half the speech therapist said she was stealing money from me, she'd taught me the sound and it was just my job to practise. So every day I work through barra, berre, birri, borro, burru, carra etc. and raba, rebe, ribi, robo, rubu etc plus other real word exercises.

The problem is, and the therapist recognised that this is true, I don't have the same problem as Spaniards who have trouble with the sound. If they have problems with the rolled R, and she can teach them the sound, then that sound becomes the normal. Every time they use an R at the beginning of a word or RR in a word, they use that new, learned sound and it is reinforced as being correct and soon becomes habitual. But I don't have trouble with the R at the beginning of a word or the RR in a word. I am not Jonathon Woss. I pronounce the R fine in English. The problem only arises when I'm speaking Spanish. I have to pronounce words differently in Spanish - the lisp in Barcelona or cerveza for instance I can manage perfectly well by using the English TH sound. If I want the  double LL sound I can use the J from just or the LL from million but for the R I don't have an English sound to commandeer. I have to change the sound as though I were a performing animal. I do it as a trick. So the sound tends to be overemphasised. I've also noticed that I'm taking a breath before making it. I'm relying on tenacity to see my through. I'm reading through the list, which takes about twenty minutes, twice a day and, with a bit of luck, I'll soon sound as Spanish as an average Scot.

Roll your own

My dancing is terrible. In fact I don't dance. I can't clap in time, I can't keep rhythm, I can't sing. At junior school they wrested the triangle from my grip enraged with my inability to strike it at the appropriate moment. At Grammar School I was beaten for singing badly. It was presumed that I was singing so tunelessly to be rebellious.

I can't roll Rs either. This is essential for speaking Spanish reasonably well. The R at the beginning of a word has to be rolled and the double RR has to be rolled. To Spaniards I sound like a Benny Hill Chinese person.

There are dozens of YouTube videos with tricks, methods, advice and examples of how to roll Rs. They all start by saying that everyone can roll Rs. Just the same way as my music teacher, Philip Tordoff, told me that everyone could sing just a few moments before he set about me with a ruler.

Apparently the trick, for Rs, not for singing, is to put the tip of the tongue on the alveolar ridge and expel enough air so that the tip of the tongue vibrates. The tongue, to produce a Spanish R, has to be somewhere near where it would be if a British person were to say de. I can do that. I can make my tongue vibrate but there is some coordination necessary with my vocal cords and that just escapes me.

It is, as Mr Jones my Latin teacher used to say, a bugger.