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ILrrr-n Posted 17 years ago
Speech & Pronunciation

How to pronounce /r/ ?

I found this page with good illustrations of how to pronounce each sounds in AE.

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/frameset.html
Is the /r/ sound featured on this page what is called an alveolar approximant by phoneticians?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_approximant
Unfortunately, I'm only able to produce the retroflex approximant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroflex_approximant
I'm I right to think that the former sound is the more prevalent one? Unfortunately, I've not been able to get this sound down yet and am only able to produce some sort of hissing sound when I try. The instructions on Wikipedia on how to pronounce the sound are pretty vague, so I would be grateful if someone gave me more detailed instructions on it.
  

Top answer

I think you should ignore the 2 Wikipedia pages and stick to the first link. I am unaware of the terms Alveolar or Retroflex approximants. Forget those and focus on the speaking.

— Anonymous

  • I think you should ignore the 2 Wikipedia pages and stick to the first link.
  • I am unaware of the terms Alveolar or Retroflex approximants.
  • Forget those and focus on the speaking.
  • What you should do is hear the sound you want to make, in this case it is an "r", and then think of sounds that require you to pronounce the "r" sound.
  • For example: immitate a lion's roar, or a dog's bark (roof, roof).
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7 Answers
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I think you should ignore the 2 Wikipedia pages and stick to the first link.

I am unaware of the terms Alveolar or Retroflex approximants. Forget those and focus on the speaking. What you should do is hear the sound you want to make, in this case it is an "r", and then think of sounds that require you to pronounce the "r" sound.

For example: immitate a lion's roar, or a dog's
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iLrrr-n I'm I right to think that the former sound is the more prevalent one?
Oops, what I meant to say is of course Am I right to think that the former sound is the more prevalent one? I would have edited the post, but didn’t find that feature anywhere.

To the point. The problem isn’t producing an R-sound, I can produce th
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Liquids do have allophones: one of the liquid /r/ allophone is retroflex. Many times, learners just focus on some abstract sound without looking at the environment. For instance, AmE /t/ has 8 allophones.

Even if a foregin language has the AmE /t/ phoneme, it may not have the same set of allophones that /t/ have in AmE.
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iLrrr-nThe problem isn’t producing an R-sound, I can produce the retroflex approximant easily and well, but it seems impossible to produce the r-sound demonstrated here on the page of the University of Iowa:

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So did I get it right? The center and the front of the tongue is raised towards the hard palete while the tip of the tongue remains relatively stationary, the sides of the tongue are pressed against the upper teeth to prevent any lateral air flow and there is no tongue curling? I think I might be getting the hang of it, but it's really hard to keep the tongue from curling back at least a little.
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iLrrr-n,

If you are just interested in producing american R, here is a tip from "American spoken english in Real life: fast natural, urgent survival foreign accent begone!" by DG Davies.

" r + vowel = ur + vowel. First say u. Tongue back into mouth does not move while lips smile changing to next vowel.
write - right urait, three thuri, brow buraun, etc."

Here is a
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I found a very nice quiz about the letter R in British English. Quiz doesn't sound very promising but the article explains how and when to pronounce British R. Then you can test your knowledge in multiple choice questions and the good thing is that the answers are explained.

This is the link

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