CONTEST - The “R” in Spanish

February 20th, 2008 admin Posted in Spanish |

Probably the most common problem among English speakers when trying the Spanish pronunciation is the R sound.

When a Spanish word starts with this letter or when it’s found in a pair (rr), the problem appears. It seems impossible to pronounce… And there are some who say it’s really impossible!

People who’s first language is English tend to lose the ability to make this sound in a couple of years after they learned to speak the language fluently, or at least this is what they say.

If you read the title of this post carefully, you should have noticed the CONTEST tag in it. Let me explain this contest to all of you. What you have to do is make a recording of you trying to pronounce a word in Spanish starting with R or with double R in it, e.g. “perro” (dog) or “rojo” (red). You may wonder what’s the prize… well, as this is a very simple contest and Language Blog is just starting, the prize is going to be a list of common Spanish phrases with an audio with their correct pronunciation (we believe it’s a good prize… and we hope you all do, too!). The winner would be the person who pronounce a “R word” the best.

To enter the contest, please subscribe to our blog using the form located in the sidebar. The next and final step would be to send us your recording to contest (at) languageblog.net (the e-mail is written this way to prevent spam).

We’re also thinking of uploading a video with all your recordings to YouTube, just for fun.

2 Responses to “CONTEST - The “R” in Spanish”

  1. konik Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 4:58 pm

    It would be not fair. I am the native Czech speaker and the sound for “r” is exactly the same as in Spanish. For me is more difficult pronouncing the English “r”, for I have different feeling in my throat. :)

  2. admin Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 5:42 pm

    Yes, after I posted this contest I thought it wouldn’t be fair.

    Anyway, we are thinking on another contest, as the post for this one was when we were just starting and we didn’t get any people to participate :)

    We were thinking on something like in how many different languages you can say “hello” or something like that. Everyone would just need to research the words. If you have thought of something, any ideas for a contest would be really appreciated :D

    We’ll be launching the contest later, though. As I said, we need to get more visitors to the website. Telling your friends would help us!

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