Well, I've used the built-in Google search engine for this website to try to research my problem, and found threads dating back to November of 2011 and earlier. Since some forum communities believe it's a violation of etiquette to post replies to an old topic, I'll just create a new one.

I'm really struggling with the phenomenon known as the "alveolar trill." Apparently, it's a sound that's used in many European languages (especially Spanish and Italian), but is totally absent in English. I know all about the similarities in tongue position that this sound shares with our "d" and "t" and how it's a vibration created by air passing over the tip of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, but I still can't seem to grasp it.

Of course, I've also had native English speakers throw in my face that they can do it, and seen dialogues about it on YouTube and other websites from speakers of other languages wondering "how it could be so hard!" Clearly, those who are able to do it ≤s≥are practicing witchcraft and must be destroyed!≤/s≥ have simply had the opportunity to practice it early. Given that some people say they "practice" their way into it (butter/ladder, anyone?) or "discover" it by accident, maybe it's just a matter of working my muscle -- literally; after all, the tongue is a muscle, and muscles have memory. Maybe once I make the right movement, I'll get it.

I tried to pronounce it the way I heard it in my "beginner" courses on here, but nearly shorted out my monitor because of the excessive amount of saliva I torpedoed onto it!

In the meantime, I guess an English "R" will just have to do. I don't like this, since I believe in doing things the proper way and want to pronounce words the way they were meant to be pronounced. Being a serious grammar nazi on other forums to speakers of English as a second language, I like to focus on perfection when speaking someone else's language! (This must be karma.)

I just wanted your thoughts on this. I'm not trying to say that an English R is better, but I am physically unable to pronounce the sound I am hearing.

I'll keep researching self-help videos and reading articles on it. I've considered everything but a speech therapist. Maybe I'm taking this too seriously.

Common sense would likely suggest to stop being an english grammar nazi and start ignoring the esperanto grammar nazis.

I find the trilled R impossible too, so use the back R (which is common in German and Scots) instead.

Understanding how to produce it makes no difference to me, I just cannot manage it. So I found a way around it.

Living in the UK, I have been exposed to quite a few English speakers from Scotand.

My impression is that they have a tendancy to trill the 'r' as it is in Esperanto, or to do front taps.

I can't ever recall them producing a German type 'r' at the back of the throat.

You might find this link interesting on How to do Scottish - the R.

Don't give up Reviewer. The German R is not particularly attractive

I think that some people, if they have a tongue which is limited with how far it can move because of a tight frenulum, can't produce the alveolar trill. At least that's what I tell myself, as I have one of those tongues and can't stick my tongue out very far. Reaching my tongue up to where it needs to be for an alveolar trill results in the whole tongue being tight, and if the tongue is tight, it can't trill.

So I use the uvular trill instead to produce a rolled r. It's not going to sound like an alveolar trill, but it does make the r roll.

There's no problem on this forum with resurrecting an old thread, FYI. Feel free to do it if you want to.

I am fortunate in that I can easily pronounce the Esperanto R, without any particular study or effort - perhaps too much imitation of the old "Rrruffles have rrrridges" TV commercials from my childhood?

Speaking Esperanto with the "correct" R will make it easier for others to understand you. Esperanto doesn't sound very nice with the American R, but the more important point is that the American R is hard for some people to hear and recognize as being an R entirely. To people from some countries, it sounds like you're talking with no R's whatsoever, not just with the "wrong" R.

Having said that, if you've tried your best and you just can't do it, don't stress yourself out too much about it. Do your best and no one can ask anything more of you.

The Esperanto R is easier to pronounce in the middle of a word than at the beginning. I'd focus on that first.

I would almost suggest that if you absolutely cannot get the R, you'd do well to pronounce the R as a D instead, a very rapidly and lightly pronounced D.

That was the advice given by the director of the children's chorus where I used to sing - we were to roll our R's when singing Latin, and if you couldn't do it, you were told to use a D instead, so not to ruin the sound.

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For the record, I think R is a difficult sound, period. My nephew is now three and I've been following the evolution of his pronunciation. For the past year, he had tended to pronounce an initial R like W (read = wead) and for a medial R, he tended to repeat another consonant from the word (Dora = Doda; Erin = Enen). He's approaching three and a half and his medial R's are beginning to approach an actual R sound, via the letter W.

My name has only just become "Ewin" after being "Enen" for the longest time, after its initial form of "Eh". Dora is firmly "Dowa". He's still a long way away from R mastery.

Don't be too hard on yourself.

Scratch:I think that some people, if they have a tongue which is limited with how far it can move because of a tight frenulum, can't produce the alveolar trill.

That's interesting, both my niece and my nephew had that. "Tongue-tied", but I assume it's the same thing. The doctors said that it could interfere with breastfeeding and that it could potentially interfere with their ease of speech and pronunciation when they got older, so they both had the frenulum snipped within a week or two of birth. I guess it was done differently when you were born, or perhaps my niece and nephew had it more severely than you do.

A friend of mine, who teaches Italian, also can't speak the alveolar R and envies me because I can without ever having it learned or trained in any way while he was in a course named "Sprecherziehung" (~ "pronounce-education") during his study. There he was told, that it can be learned by finding a point in the mouth where an R-sound becomes an L-sound. For example in the word "kora": Notice the different positions of your tounge when speaking "kora" and "kola"! Somewhere in between the alveolar R is formed. Maybe this helps.

EDIT: Because "pronounce-education" sound like my friend has some kind of speech defect: This is not the case. It was just a course to improve the clearness of the pronounciation of sounds.

I am also incapable of trilling r's. Tried and tried, and simply cannot. So, I have to just accept that wherever I go, I'll get pegged as an American.

Meh. I can handle it.

erinja:Speaking Esperanto with the "correct" R will make it easier for others to understand you. Esperanto doesn't sound very nice with the American R, but the more important point is that the American R is hard for some people to hear and recognize as being an R entirely. To people from some countries, it sounds like you're talking with no R's whatsoever, not just with the "wrong" R.

To me, this brings up the whole issue of any conIAL's phonetic inventory. Who is the target audience? Adult learners or young children? As Mario Pei pointed out in One Language for the World, approximately speaking all languages are equally easy to very young children in immersion environments with native speakers. So it doesn't really matter what we use for in that instance.

On the other hand, given the reality of the current world, the majority of would-be conIAL (including Esperanto) learners are adults or at least late adolescents. For them, this or that sound can be difficult. For example, for native English speakers, the sounds /T/ and /D/ (SAMPA notation) are ridiculously easy, because they occur in some of the most frequently used words in the language. However, for many adult learners of English whose native tongues do not have those sounds, they are perplexingly (to me, of course) damnably difficult, almost impossible. On the other hand, no normal human tongue can possibly correctly pronounce the Slavic palatalized consonants.

So might it also be with Esperanto. As has been mentioned in this thread, for some -- including me -- a trilled 'r' is almost impossible. If that is what an Esperanto 'r' is supposed to be, then I simply cannot pronounce E-o correctly. But am I supposed to pronounce it as a 'd', as erinja suggests? What does that say about the supposed "easiness" or "universality" of E-o as a language (as a spoken language, of course, not as a written code)?

In some discussion groups over the years, it has been said that the intersection of the sets of phonemic inventories of all (or nearly all) human languages is so small as not to be adequate for designing an auxiliary language which will present absolutely no pronunciation difficulties for anybody. Eventually, somehow, somewhere, at some time, somebody (meaning an adult learner) may simply have difficulty with something. And that includes the Esperanto beloved of people here. They just have to accept that some (adult) learners will probably never be able to pronounce the language "correctly." But if some of them will never be able to do so, is there enough flexibility that they will be understood (in speaking)?