Very odd spanish question

[nukeswife]

I took 2 years of Spanish in high school and really enjoyed it, but never took it any farther. My kids would be interested in learning spanish and I feel comfortable teaching them with something like Spanish for children (even thought of using it without the DVD), but (here comes the odd question) I can't roll my "r"s. I've tried over and over to learn how and no matter what I do, it only comes out sounding like I have a horrible phlegm problem. :001_huh: Do you think this will be a big problem?

[EppieJ]

I would suggest finding a native speaker that they could listen to or interact with. Or even check out the spanish speaking tv channels. You may be able to find some appropriate children's shows. Find audio books that they can listen to. You can teach them the basics, but this will allow them the opportunity to hear good pronunciation.

 

Or you could take them to Mexico! Just a thought. :laugh:

 

We are using Rosetta Stone Latin American Spanish. I know enough Spanish to help ds, but am not fluent enough to just speak Spanish to him. RS is an immersion program and works well. It can be prohibitively expensive, however. We have access thru our school district and it only costs us $25.00 per school year to use (yay!)

Edited February 7, 2011 by EppieJ

[wapiti]

I can't roll Rs either. I kind of make it a "d".

[Satori]

I can't roll my 'r' either, and Spanish was one of my majors in college. I haven't thought about that issue when trying to teach my daughter.

 

We're using Elementary Spanish, where she hears other people speak it and say the r-sound properly, so I guess we're okay. I am re-learning right along with her and then we try to speak it in our everyday language.

 

My husband is working in Mexico this spring, so we could make a trip sometime. We were just in Mexico over Thanksgiving though.

[SoCal Sandra]

It's something I figured out instinctively when I learned Spanish decades ago and I know other people who taught themselves the same way.

 

Basically, you just make the sound of the letter "d" in rapid succession, move your tongue down just a bit while still making the sound, and then blow air out while you continue making the sound.

 

When my sons were very young I taught them this way because I knew that this simple rolling sound gets you the most bang for your peso in terms of sounding authentic. Acquiring that one sound will make your accent so much better. I taught it to dss long before they started a Spanish curriculum because it's easier to learn at a young age. Give it a try, if you haven't already. Even if you can't quite get it, tell your children how to do it so they can learn it while they are young.

 

You said you may try Spanish for Children. Oddly enough, when dss started Spanish for Children last year I was delighted to see that they describe the same method.

 

I remind my kids that if they pronounce their "r"s correctly, muffle their "d"s, and clip their vowel sounds, they will be on the road to developing a good accent.

 

HTH

[pahansen]

Even after five years of Spanish and four semesters of Slovak (where you sometimes roll r's to emphasize a word), I couldn't roll my r's until about two years ago! (I'm 36!) It happened accidentally when I tried it and started with more of an /h/ sound. Now I can do it well about 85% of the time. (It's easier for me at the beginning of a word.) I've never heard of the repeated /d/ thing, but it sounds like it works.

 

But here's the fun part: my son (5 years old at the time) was asking me what that sounded like, and I was doing my best to explain/demonstrate, when he said, "You mean like this?" and had a perfect /rr/! I think it's one of those things that some people just "get," so I wouldn't let it stop me from teaching my kids Spanish. Just make sure that they know that /rr/ is a problem for you, and let them hear plenty of good examples. You may find out that your children are naturals!

 

It's also a great way to introduce the idea of accents and how/why native speakers generally sound different than foreigners! ;)

 

--Pamela

[nukeswife]

Thanks for the tips ladies.

 

I'll keep trying to work on mine and maybe we'll start it as a small thing with the kids before we actually start a spanish program.

[Dmmetler]

I've got the opposite problem-I can't pronounce the English /r/ at all consistently, even after years of speech therapy (my phonemic production stalled at about a 4 yr old level, and mostly the years of therapy just were trying to find work-arounds), but I can do the rolled Spanish R (mostly, I think, because I learned to sing in Italian before I learned Spanish)-so I tend to roll Rs when they're not needed. DH's accent is better than mine, but it's still not exactly "native".

 

We use Elementary Spanish and DVDs in Spanish to hear better pronunciation. What I've noticed, though, is that the native speakers in our area (which were the whole reason we started with Spanish at about age 2 or so-half the kids my DD would end up playing with on the playground didn't speak English) don't sound like the accents on Elementary Spanish either. So DD is getting a mix of accents.