Quick Tip #2: How to Flip Your “R” in Spanish

How to Flip your R in Spanish

Hi! I’m Justin Ryan with a quick tip on how to flip your Rs in Spanish.

 Spanish has 2 main R sounds:

• Rolled
• Flipped

 Today I’ll just be focusing on the flipped R.

If you are an English speaker and you think you can’t flip your Rs – you’re wrong. You can. And I can prove it to you. 

Who is this?

If you said Yoda, you are right. And if you said Yoda, you can also flip your Rs.

What!? There are no Rs in Yoda. That is correct, however, you’ve just made an identical sound to the flipped R in Spanish. My original statement was that if you are an English speaker, you can flip your Rs, indicating the type of sound you make with your tongue.

You are just not thinking of an R when you do it.  Instead you are probably thinking of a quick T or a quick D sound as the one in Yoda. So, going back to our Yoda example, say it again but this time drop the letter Y

This is identical to the way you say “time” in Spanish. Except it’s spelled H-O-R-A. Hora.

Of course, we as English speakers are not used to associating those sounds w/ those letters. So, to say what time is it in Spanish is “¿Qué hora es?” (using our newly associated sound).

In fact, you can probably even get by actually saying Yoda in the sentence 

 And this applies to a whole lotta words!  Including the one I just said – lotta

lara      =     lotta                   (whole lotta words)

pari      =     potty                  (I gotta go potty)

gara     =     gotta                 (I gotta go potty)

para     =     pot o’                (pot o’ gold)

tera      =     potata           (potato said lazily)

vera     =     Darth Vada     (Darth Vader said lazily)

jerai     =     Jedi                    (Obi Won Kanobi)

And that is how to pronounce the flipped R in Spanish.

I will leave you with one final thought on this, and that is – Don’t try to smuggle in the English R. It is very tempting to try to bring that English R right in there together with the flipped Spanish R.

For instance, in the case of Yoda, you might try to say horda But that is not correct. It’s best if you completely forget the English R altogether!

And there you have it, you’ll be flipping your Rs all over the place in no time!

Links

If you like this post, check out the FREE video course I made called The Foreign Language Smart Start. It was created to help you start learning your first words and phrases in a foreign language.

If you want to see the strategies from the video course put into action, check out the 28 Day Spanish Challenge.  I personally used the strategies that I teach in the course to learn my first words and phrases in Spanish.