Get rolling!

Many years ago, during my first faltering attempts at Hispanic communication, I asked a young waiter in a café-bar for two glasses of rosé wine, which in Spanish is vino rosado. Two glasses, dos copas, so there you go: Dos copas de vino rosado. Easy, see?

The waiter, who was probably called Juan, frowned and leaned closer. I had already learned to dread this Spanish frown. It is not one of annoyance, it simply means I'm concentrating really, really hard to try and catch some faint inkling of what you're on about.

Try again: vino rosado? with hopeful doggy expression. No joy. Juan smiles apologetically and tries a wild guess: 'You want two beers?'

I was rescued by Victoria, the landlady of the apartment where we were staying at that time, who fortuitously passed by at the height of the impasse. She said exactly what I'd said but this time Juan nodded gratefully and toddled off to get the wine.

A bit miffed, I demanded to know in what particular respect my pronunciation had been deficient. Well, difficult to know where to start with that one, but it seemed the crucial failure was the 'r' of rosado.

I hadn't yet learned to trill. In Spanish, when an 'r' comes at the beginning of a word it requires work. You must start it up, roll it along on your tongue then release it like a motorised butterfly: rrrrrosado!

Likewise, a double 'rr' in the middle of a word: Un tarrrrro de mermelada! will get you a jar of marmalade. Maybe.

Learning Spanish is no more difficult than learning any other language. It's just that the sounds you're supposed to make demand courage and, especially, a tongue that's unafraid of adventure. It has to be prepared for new and strange experiences.

Our landlady Victoria was very good at nurturing tongue-tied foreigners. With great patience and tact she taught our two tongues the basic tricks. That word rosado for example: it wasn't just the 'r' I was getting wrong. 'You're saying the 'd' so it sounds like 't' to me,' Victoria explained. Really? But surely a 'd' is just a 'd', whether Spanish or English...?

No it isn't. Victoria had uncovered for us a crucially important, breakthrough piece of information. 'You must put your tongue,' she explained, 'behind your teeth like this.' Tip of tongue against back of upper incisors. Your 'd' then comes out like 'th' in bother. Thus, the capital city of Spain is not what you thought at all, it's Mathrith.

The dictionaries make light of this. Some even claim that 'd' at the beginning of a word is the same as in English, which is outrageously false. Just listen to a Spaniard!

Even better, watch their mouth closely as they speak. I offer here the simplest and most useful piece of pronunciation advice you may ever read: When speaking Spanish, the tip of your tongue should play a dominant role, clearly visible from the outside, waggling around like a trapped ferret.

Victoria, bless her little waggling tongue, also gave us this useful rhyme for practising the motorised 'r' (erre, pronounced ay-ray, means the letter 'r'):

Erre con erre cigarro

Erre con erre barril

Rápido corren los carros

Los carros del ferrocarril

It's almost meaningless but not quite: R with R cigar / R with R barrel / Rapidly run the cars / the cars of the railway.

Intriguingly, the fourth line is sometimes written as Cargados de azúcar al ferrocarril - 'loaded with sugar on the railway' - which conjures a wonderful image of steam trains puffing through waving fields of sugar cane under a blazing sun, long ago in Cuba. Or Mexico, perhaps, or ...?

I'm sure this little poem has an interesting history.