Mastering the Trill: A Comprehensive Guide to Rolling Your 'R's

The "rrrolling R," also known as the voiced alveolar trill, is a common phoneme in various languages. It is used to pronounce words in languages like Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, and Scottish English. For those who haven’t grown up speaking these languages, however, it can be a difficult sound to produce. Like any skill, however, rolling your Rs can be learned with a bit of practice and perseverance.

Understanding the Basics

Before diving into the techniques, it's crucial to understand the mechanics involved in producing a rolled "R." Also known as an alveolar trill (or just “trill” for short), this spoken sound is made by forcing air past your tongue in a way that causes the tongue to vibrate and produce a rolling, hammering sound.

Anatomy of the Sound

In order to follow the steps to achieve a rolled “R,” it’s helpful to know exactly what parts of your mouth are involved. Specifically, it’s important to identify your alveolar ridge and the tip of your tongue. Imagine you have a spoonful of peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth. Use the tip of your tongue to reach far back in your mouth and scrape forward, like you’re trying to scrape away the peanut butter.

Dispelling Myths

Rolling your “R”s isn’t genetic, but some people can do it more easily than others based on their linguistic background and other factors. Even speakers of Scottish English may easily roll their Rs, while their linguistic counterparts in England and America (and other English-speaking countries) struggle to do so. Conversely, your tongue actually doesn’t move on its own at all when you’re rolling an “R” (plus, it’s pretty much humanly impossible to move your tongue that fast). Actually, rolling your “R”s is often overcomplicated by people who are trying (and failing) to do it. To roll your “R”s, all you need to do is lift the tip of your tongue and breathe. Confusingly, the English “r” and the rolled “r” have pretty much nothing to do with each other. In fact, the English “r” doesn’t exist in Spanish at all! The English “r” is made in the back of your mouth-when you say “r,” notice how you feel the back of your throat opening up and your tongue retracting toward the back of your mouth? The Spanish trill (or double “rr”) is made in the front of your mouth by touching your tongue to your alveolar ridge. If you’re struggling to visualize this difference, touch the tip of your tongue to your alveolar ridge (the hard line that curves along the roof of your mouth, directly behind your teeth). Try saying “r” as you normally would in English without moving your tongue from the ridge.

Relaxation and Placement: The Foundation for Success

As I mentioned above, relaxation is crucial to getting the tongue to vibrate. Most of the phonemes that are produced in English require active movement of the tongue. Active movement means that the tongue has to contract or move in a certain way in order to produce the sound. Trilled R requires the tongue to be at a super relaxed state in order to vibrate. I like to provide my students with an analogy of a flag waving in the wind. The flag allows the wind to decide the movement. We can say that our tongue is like the flag in which the airflow will trigger the vibration. I instruct my students to relax their facial muscles, drop their jaw and tongue (making sure it's not touching the hard palate). We will do this a couple of times in therapy. Then I instruct them to breathe in through their nose and out through their mouth while maintaining their tongue in a relaxed state. In phase 2, we discuss the placement of trilled R or voiced alveolar trill. This includes discussing what it sounds like when your voice box is turned on and where your tongue goes when producing the sound. When producing the trilled R, your tongue needs to be in a flat and wide position.

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Visualization

In this phase, I like to show my students a Youtube video that allows the student to visualize the placement of the tongue when it vibrates. Understanding how to vibrate your tongue might be difficult when you're unfamiliar with what a vibration sensation feels like.

Techniques and Exercises

Here are several methods and exercises to help you achieve the elusive rolled "R":

The Q-Tip Method

The first method will require the use of a Q-tip. You will instruct your student to say the /d/ sound really fast. As he/she is saying the sound, take the Q-tip and place it horizontally under their tongue. Lift the Q-tip so that you begin to restrict the student's airflow of the /d/ sound.

Raspberry Sounds

Another strategy is to have your student produce raspberry sounds while maintaining his/her tongue tip on the alveolar ridge.

The "Tiger" Growl

Clear your throat on a ckh sound. While continuing to clear your throat, turn the ckh into a grr sound, like a tiger’s growl.

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The "Vision" Method

This method involves speaking quite loudly, so you’ll want to try this somewhere you won’t be bothering anyone. Say the word “vision.” Make the middle of the word (which sounds like “zh”) last for 3-4 seconds. As you extend the “zh” sound over those 3-4 seconds, increase the volume of the sound. The last part of the word (the ’n’) should be very short, but should also continue to increase in volume. Add the word “dream” to create a phrase. Relax your tongue when you get to the “dr” part of the word “dream.” Make it go floppy. Since you’re speaking very loudly now, the breath coming out of your mouth should make your tongue vibrate.

Tongue Twisters

Practice tongue twisters, this will make your tongue used to moving quickly. Tongue twisters are a fun way of overcoming pronunciation obstacles.

Erre con erre cigarro, erre con erre barril. Rápido corren los carros, sobre los rieles del ferrocarril. (R with R cigar, R with R barrel.
El perro de San Roque no tiene rabo, porque Ramón Ramirez se lo ha robado.
Erre con erre cigarro, erre con erre barril. Rápido corren los carros, detrás del ferrocarril. (“R with R cigarette, R with R barrel.
Tres tristes tigres tragaban trigo en un trigal. En un trigal, tragaban trigo tres tristes tigres. (“Three sad tigers were swallowing wheat in a wheat field.

Experimenting with Sounds

Try a sound like err, irr, arr, trr, drr, brr, or orr. Keep practicing, experimenting, and making minor adjustments.

Combining with Vowels and Consonants

Once you’re able to (somewhat) consistently roll your “R”s, practice combining your trill with vowels and consonants to create words. First, try rolling your “R” with a vowel attached: relax your mouth and say ahhhhh. Alternate the ah with the trill, attempting to eliminate the pause between the two with each repetition. Once you’ve mastered the vowel, try adding a consonant (aka, achieving your first real word with the rolled “R”!). Say “ta-da” a few times, getting faster and faster on each repetition. Continue until you’re saying “ta-da” as quickly as you possibly can.

Mimicking and Listening

If you have friends who do know how to trill, ask them to demonstrate it for you so you can “take notes,” if you will. If you don’t know anyone who can roll their Rs (or think it would be weird), listen to Peruvian singer Susana Baca belt ’em out in her song “Resbalosas.” There’s a particularly mournful part of the song near the end where Baca drags out the word cierra that really helped me to hear the rolled R.

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Advanced Tips and Considerations

Here are some additional tips and considerations:

Tongue Placement: I make my best RRs if my tongue is a little farther back in my mouth. Too close to my teeth, and tierra sounds more like tiezha, but toward the back (near that “alveolar ridge” right before the roof of your mouth rises up) and it’s perfect.
Jaw Movement: When I was first getting used to this new sound my mouth could create, I had trouble making it unless I moved my jaw to the right. This might be because my face isn’t perfectly symmetrical (one of my ears is lower than the other…whomp, whomp), but for all I know, moving my jaw side to side or forward and back helps those rolled Rs to, uh, roll along.
Vocalization: I can make both the typical voiced trill and Icelandic-style voiceless one, but it’s a lot easier to make the rolled R sound if you support it with voice.
Diaphragm Support: Like #8, support your attempts to roll your R with your diaphragm. By this, I mean when you practice saying names like Fuencarral, Tarragona, or Ferrol, suck in your stomach to raise your diaphragm muscle, which will help push more air out and make it easier to trill that R.
Start with Intervocalic Positions: When you’re first learning the rolled R, it’s hardest to make the sound on its own, independent from a word or syllable. Then comes the initial position; in Spanish, Rs at the starts of words are rolled, but don’t stress about those at the beginning. Focus on practicing the trill in the intervocalic position; i.e., when it appears between two vowels.

The Importance of Practice and Patience

The rolling R sound is not an easy sound to produce. It may not come to you quickly or easily. You will likely have to practice several times a day for weeks before you successfully roll an R without thinking about it. Be persistent! I can’t repeat it enough that it took me two years of college to finally learn how to roll my Rs in Spanish. Remember that, unless you have an actual disability with your tongue, you can physically make the sound…you just have to trick your body into doing it, and once you’ve gotten past that initial time, the muscle memory will stick with you like riding a bike.

Phonotactic Considerations

Phonotactic constraints are rules and restrictions concerning the ways in which syllables can be created in a language. Restrictions can exist on the types of sounds that are allowed to occur next to each other as well as how they occur in the positions of various words. Why is this important? Well, you want to make sure that you choose appropriate word targets for your student. In Spanish, Trilled R can occur in the initial and medial position of words. It can occur after /l/, /n/, or /s/. Trilled R is always followed by a vowel. In Spanish, trilled R does not occur at the final position of words.

What if You Can't Roll Your 'R's?

If you can’t manage to roll your “R”s, people who speak other languages will still mostly be able to understand you. In Spanish, it’s pretty important to roll your “R”s as it changes the meaning of some words (e.g., perro (dog) vs. pero (but)).

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