Hello everyone,
I'm from Hong Kong. My mother tongue is Cantonese and I can speak Mandarian and English (in American and British accent). A week ago, I borrowed a few books about Russian language and was planning to self-learn it to challenge myself. I found Russian language sounds very very very cool after I watched a few videos of Vladimir Putin's speech on YouTube. But sooner, when I looked into the alphabet list, listened to CDs, tried very hard to pronounced the letters, it comes to me that it is impossible for me to roll my R's. I cannot vibrate my tongue up and down, and cannot curl up my tongue laterally (I think this is genetically determined, I can't do this since I was born. But if this is true, does that mean all Russian has the genes for tongue-rolling?? that is scary ). I can reluctantly use another way to mimick the R sound but it becomes not pragmatic at all, if I do it during conversation, as I could imagine.
My problem here is, should I keep on learning Russian, even if I cannot roll the R's. Because I'm very afraid of spending months and years studying Russian, and maybe I still cannot roll it and if I had a chance to live in Russia (or even a long time), would Russian people discriminate or tease at people who cannot roll their Rs, for example, teasing at immigrants, foreign workers, who could not roll their R's when they are trying to integrate into the Russian society?? This is a serious question for me. I really want your advice on this guys.
Do anyone have the experience as I do???