learn how to roll my Rs

Recent discovery: my mother and grandmother can roll their Rs. So either I inhereted non-rolly-Rs from my father’s side, or I’m a genetic freak (which I think is partly true anyways), or I just haven’t figured it out yet. Probably some combination of all 3. Mom’s really amused with my pathetic attempts at R rolling. As soon as she gets home she’s going to see if my brother and sister can do it and try to teach them if they can’t, so when I come home they can all tease me with their Rrrrrrrrrrs.

Oh, I love my family.

I may be giving up on this, or at least putting it on hold for a long time. My tongue just doesn’t seem to work that way.

No such luck. Bah.

My good friend Kate is visiting me for spring break. She’s spending the semester studying in Salzburg and perfecting her German. We were talking about our language learning experiences and I complained about my complete inability to roll my Rs. She responded by demonstrating the skill perfectly and I gave her a glare. She told me how there was a particular guttural sound in German that she just couldn’t seem to do, even after 6 years of studying German. I tried and found that I had no trouble at all making this particular sound and I got a glare from Kate. Maybe we’re just speaking the wrong language. I ought to have tried German.

I can fake the tongue rolling sound thing pretty well by pronouncing my Rs as if they were French and doing the throaty-R thing, which works all right, but I still can’t do anything with my tongue. The throaty fake rolled Rs also don’t work for singing. Maybe my tongue’s just dysfunctional.

Through my five years of French classes I never figured out how to roll my Rs. Now I’m in Italy taking Italian which involves even more R rolling than French does and I’m still clueless as to how I’m supposed to be making my tongue do that.

My roommate tells me that her Italian teacher said that about half of all people are born genetically unable to roll their Rs. I feel like I might be one of them, but how can you really tell that? Is there some muscle or nerve you look for and if it isn’t there you say “Hey, I’m genetically predispositioned to never be able to roll my Rs!” or something? The previously mentioned roommate also said that she vaguely remembers high school Spanish classes involving practice excercises to help you roll your Rs, but alas, she doesn’t remember any of them. Blast.

I signed up to join the school choir here. Today was the first practice. A whole three people, myself included, showed up. That meant that the overly excited choir director could take time with each of us to do warmups and figure out our ranges. He gave us some music to sight read (an Italian song by Monteverdi or something like that) and as he was going over the pronunciation and the tune with us, trilling all the Rs like it was nothing, I asked if it was a problem that I couldn’t roll my Rs. The next ten minutes were spent with the overly smiley chorus teacher trying to get me to copy him saying things like “Verrrrrrrrrry!” (me: Vehry! damn Pittsburgh accent) and doing motorcycle imitations (Him: “Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroom! Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroom!” Me: “I’m sorry! What do you want from me? Vroom! Broom!”). It went something like this:
Overly excited chorus teacher: “Say ‘Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry!’”
Me: “Vehry!”
Other girl in choir: “Try saying ‘Vedy’ with a ‘D’ then just repeat the ‘D’ sound.”
Overly excited chorus teacher: “Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry!”
Me: “Vedy? Ved-d-d-dy?”
Overly excited chorus teacher: “Just imitate me! Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry!”
Me: “I have no idea what you’re doing! I don’t know how you’re doing what you’re doing! I have no idea how to do whatever it is you’re doing with your tongue!”
Overly excited chorus teacher: “Alorrrrrra. I guess we’ll work on that.”

It’s gonna be a long semester.