Learn how to ROLL YOUR R in Spanish

Doing your R sound in Spanish or your D sound in Spanish, it's not as difficult as it seems. A lot of people have trouble because they think they need to do a lot of effort. Also, English speakers specifically, because the English consonants are so strong, so crisp and sharp, they want to do the same with the R and they want to make it super crisp and super sharp and they make too much effort. I want to say that doing the R sound, it's not harder than doing the D sound or the S sound or the F sound, okay? So if you can do those, you can also do the R sound, okay? You only need to move your tongue in a slightly different way that you've done before. This is just a practice for how to prepare your mouth to do the R sound naturally without feeling so overwhelmed by it. But if you want to know more about the sounds of Spanish and how to do the R and how to practice all the other sounds of Spanish, check out my course Sounds of Spanish. It's like a gym for your speech articulators. It's a gym for your mouth and a gym for your ears, so you can train yourself to hear and spot those sounds at the same time as you train yourself on how to do those sounds. So you can go check it, the link is in my description. If you do this practice every day, it's just like five minutes or three minutes, it won't take you long, it will help. I recommend that you always look at your face. Get a pocket mirror, get the camera, selfie camera, whatever, and look at your face and try to copy my face as well. You need to make sure that your face does not move in a way that you don't want it to move because we don't know what we do with our face if we don't see it many times. First, start doing the sound. The sound is made by putting the tongue between your teeth, like kind of biting it but without biting it, and the same sound that you have in English for then. So do that but a bit softer. Once you have it, feel and notice the airflow, the vibration, how it tickles a little bit and where. Right on the tip of my tongue. Once you have that locked in, I'm gonna move closer. Once you have it locked in, try to do, keep the same thing, keep the same but as you move your tongue backward, okay? So like imagine that the tongue, your tongue, is like a brush and you're brushing your teeth and your palate as you hold the it starts feeling weird when you get to your palate, to your alveolar ridge, but that's why it should feel. Just keep doing it. Do that a couple of times and play around with it. Be a bit curious and try to think what happens if I put a bit more pressure or a bit less pressure or if I touch a bit more with the side or with the tip or try to be curious with this movement. Put it closer or put a bit more far from your palate, okay? Once you've done that, do it one more time and stay there and stay at your alveolar ridge. Alveolar ridge being the back of your teeth without touching your teeth. Stay here for a while for as long as you have breath and don't let it go. Okay, then next time you do it, start again from your teeth. Keep it behind there and try to now consciously play around by putting your tongue closer to your palate and then far, close, far. Try to move like touch, leave space, touch, leave space. It should sound like this. Like you're doing... Okay, so basically you're relaxing your tongue, letting the airflow come out and then blocking the airflow. Just do that over and over. This is a really soft trill. So you have it here. Then the more you do this, your tongue will get used to this movement and a trill will come out. Don't worry, but don't try to trill. That's the key number one about this exercise. Don't try to trill. Don't try to make an R. Just do this, okay? Next exercise, we'll step it up and instead of doing it with your mouth neutral, you'll start to do it with your mouth spread. Look at how my mouth is super spread and not moving. It's like a picture of me smiling. Now do the same with your lips rounded. If you lose it, if you lose that point, go back to the start. To your... Okay, next thing we're going to do is we're going to add a little sound, a little vowel sound, okay? When we have our lips spread, we go... Notice how my tongue falls and then goes back up. Now we'll string it all together. Not letting any space, no pause, no re, re, re, but re, re, re, re, re, okay? Over and over. Then with the O. This might be harder, but just if you lose it, go back to the beginning. Okay? And then with the U. Now with the E. Okay? Just do this little thing. It's five minutes every day and tell me how your comes up, but don't try to trill yet. First, just do that. And this is all for today. If you like these little practice kind of videos, let me know and I'll make more. Ciao.