Yesterday, my friend was trying to teach me how to roll my r's properly when speaking Spanish. I've never really been able to manage to do it right, so he was trying to teach me. And in the process, I discovered that we say our r's really weird in English.
My friend kept saying, "Say run." And after some back and forth, I realized that r's are very different in English and Spanish*. When he says "run", its a postalveolar sound--the tongue hits kind of between the hard palate and the alveolar** (the area above the back of the teeth).
In English, we make a palatal r sound--our tongues are back farther in our mouth, and the sound is made in the area of our palate. Which was a revelation to my friend (and to me) and also made him want to puke a little. Not sure I blame him. When he made his r's the way we do in English, the difference between the two pronunciations became really obvious.
It was a very entertaining conversation with lots of laughter (mostly at my horrible attempts to not vomit r's) and I don't know that it's necessarily blog worthy, but I share it because 1) I just love that it's a conversation I got to have in the middle of a Walmart and it makes me happy that I have friends around the world, and 2) I finally know how to actually learn to roll my r's and get better at Spanish. So it brought me joy, and we all need more of that.
**Again, it's been 20 years, so I may be a little off on this, but that is how he was saying it.
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