can I still learn the Russian language even if I can’t roll/trill my R’s?
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at
8:51 pm
I'm thinking of learning Russian for fun, I know it's not going to be easy but I've been trying to roll my R's and I just can't do it. Can I still learn and will I still be understood even though I can't?
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Find someone Russian and ask them to teach you this one sound. Many Russian children face this problem, but somehow they manage to master this sound after all
Don’t give up, because in fact you CAN roll your r
Listen2 R: it’s not to show off – it’s to show how simple it is!
Also it’s how children are taught: "Rrr. Say Rrr. No, it should be Rrr. Try again: Rrrr". And since children don’t mind to try again and again, and don’t get all that insulted, they learn.
All right, I’ll try to *describe* it
First, it’s not rolling, so don’t roll anything anywhere.
Neither it is trilling, because the word "trill" explains nothing.
It is vibrating.
Touch your palate with the tip of your tongue. There is a "corner" behind upper incisors, so touch this corner. Sides of the tongue should also be a little raised, they may even touch molars; its dorsum should remain lowered: if you raise it, you’ll have soft R like in дверь.
Now exhale.
The tongue should be tense in its posture, so that your exhalation would make it only vibrate, not fall down.
Thus, the sound can last for as long as you can exhale.
What you may have to change in process:
- exact positions of all parts of tongue;
- the power of exhale vs the power of tongue
I’ve been wandering here for a few minutes roaring..and that’s all I can say
Of course you can, you’ll just speak with an accent. And you can practice while you’re learning, it’s sort of like flicking your tongue against the top of your mouth.
I almost have the same problem, even though I’m swedish, it’s typical swedish to have a rolling R, I live in the southern part and our R’s are the same as the French.
But I think you have to do the R high up on your tongue to make it roll or at least it works for me.
Of course they will understand you, I’m pretty sure that there are some accents where they don’t trill they r’s
I know when I learned Spanish, I had a hard time rolling my R’s. After years of listening and practicing, I am able to roll my R’s almost all of them.
Being an English teacher,though,I cab assure you that phonetics is not that actual.You just need to be understandable.Don’t bother about the sounds.
All you need is just to have fun & satisfaction with any language you study.
Da, you can definitely learn Russian even if you can’t roll your R’s.
I can’t roll them either, but it hasn’t stopped me over the past 5 years.
That being said, I notice Russians are used to hearing a rolled r in conversation, and in some instances they won’t ‘hear’ the standard English r, and might be confused if I say a rolled-r word in isolation. But this very rarely happens, and even when it does, there is a cheating method I’ll describe below (since using it I never get any confused looks).
Even if one of your Russian words has a strong accent from lack of a rolled r, context is very important, so most Russians will understand what you are saying by comprehending the sentence as a whole.
Now, the ‘cheating method’ is simple. It isn’t a real rolled-r because you can’t make an elongated rolled-r sound using this technique (I notice when you tell people that you cant roll r’s they tend to show off and roll a verrry long r
All you do is flick your tongue back along the tip of your top front teeth while you are saying r. We do it naturally when we say the word "thrust". Notice when you say thurst the tip of the tongue flicks back after the ‘th’ sound. Now all you have to do is generalise that tongue movement to Russian words. Say the Russian word slowly with the fake r until it becomes natural, and after a while you will sound like you are doing a short rolled r every time!
It might be encouraging to know that many Russians have problems with certain combinations of English letters too. For example, there is no ‘th’ sound in the Russian language, so ‘birthday’ often comes out as ‘birzday’ .. nor is there any elongated ‘ee’ sound .. so Ive noticed ’sheet’ often comes out as sh%t
)) quite amusing for me .. payback for me not being able to roll my r’s 
Anyways, hope that helps and don’t let a little r get in the way of you learning russian…. there are many harder things about russian you should worry about