Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

Rolling Your R
After outward appearance and general way of acting, the next obvious
reason that people will know you are a foreigner is your accent.
The first component of accent reduction is to look at the individual
sounds you can’t create right now. Even the most basic language courses

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will cover in an early lesson the differences between your native tongue and
the target language.
Prioritize fixing these to be as close to the real sounds as early as
possible, because there are always a tiny number of sounds you need to
learn, and if you do this right, you can have the beginnings of a much
improved accent as you are pronouncing basic terms. Because there are just
half a dozen or so new sounds you need to learn how to produce, focus on
them as early as the first week, if you can. You don’t have to say these new
sounds perfectly, but if you get them close enough, and quickly enough,
you’ll find it a lot easier to make them more precise with time than if you
had used English equivalents.
Some of these are incredibly easy to mimic quickly. For instance, the
German ü and the French u can both be approximated surprisingly well by
rounding your lips as if you are going to say an oo sound but then actually
say an ee sound. It’s more complicated than this, but even this
approximation can be worth practicing your very first day so that you are
close to the actual sound.
Another one that is much easier to do than people believe is the alveolar
flap—the r (between two vowels, like in caro) that appears in many
languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Slavic languages, and many
more. What so many people don’t realize is that they can already
approximate this sound, even if they can only speak English. Do not try to
change your English r to a flapped or rolled one, because this is far too
different. You may as well try to learn how to say the letter m by starting
with a k sound, in terms of how well connected they are!
No, in fact, we produce something incredibly similar (at least in
American English) when we say the word “butter.” Not that r at the end, but
that tt sound in the middle! Say it now quickly in a sentence, so you are less
focused on forcing an unnatural pronunciation, and rather than an explosive
t sound, like in “time,” you have a flap of the tongue. Now change that b to
a c and say “cutter” the same way. Then change the er sound to an o sound
and say it a few times, watching that you aren’t saying a t sound but
maintaining the flap sound. Finally, open your mouth wider to change the u
sound to an a and you have that word caro (which means “expensive” in
Spanish and Portuguese).
It’s certainly weird to get an r sound out of what is written as a t sound,
but this is much closer to what we want in terms of mouth positions. It’s

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also a much better starting point from which to merge into an alveolar flap
later, and we temporarily use it to make sure that what we are saying is
clearer to a native ear than a very English barking r.
Another way to approximate the alveolar flap is to say la, followed by
da, and do so very quickly. Try saying “la, da, la, da, la, da,” and so on. You
will notice that you keep moving your tongue forward and backward. Now
try to stop it somewhere halfway. It’s easier than you think!
There are a host of other sounds, which I won’t cover here, but look
them up on YouTube, where they are explained very well. In many
segments, a native will explain how a sound works and give suggestions for
how to say it. This helps much more than reading an explanation, because
you can hear how it should sound and mimic it along with the video. This
way you can get a pretty good command of those few sounds that are
different from your mother tongue.
When you take on the challenge of trying to sound more like a native,
focus on pronunciation and sit down with a native speaker (in person or
during an online call) who can tell you precisely why you are pronouncing
something incorrectly. If you do this, I would highly recommend that you
ask the native speaker to mimic how you are saying it followed by how it
should be said. It’s a little embarrassing to feel like someone is mocking
your bad sound, but this has helped me notice the real difference much
more quickly.
I remember that I spent several hours trying to roll my r, and over
several days I tried to mimic a purring cat while relaxing my tongue and
blowing air over it. Tougher sounds like this, which are nothing like what
you have in your native language, can take some getting used to, but
practice and feedback from natives can help you create them. There is
nothing stopping you from genuinely learning them. The idea that your
tongue doesn’t have the muscles—or other such excuses—is nothing but
ridiculous.
This practice is important to both getting the approximation of a new
sound and aspiring to sound like a native while you tweak those lingering
minor mistakes.