Jennie931 wrote:I am learning Romanian at the moment. I was wondering do Romanian people roll their R's like Italians or Spanish people do? I have realised in a video that this girl who is Romanian doesn't roll her R's strong but it's not a strong rolled r, it's like a soft rolled r.
There is some variation even among native speakers, but basically the Romanian r's are flaps, and by flap I mean a trill with a single vibration cycle (the tongue tip touches the alveolar ridge just once). However, at word beginnings r's can have several cycles. The same happens when a word is emphasized; in literature and also in informal writing you can sometimes find words spelled with three r's in a row, such as
rrrepede and
drrracului, which reflects the way these words are pronounced when they are strongly stressed.
There is no phonemic distinction between the alveolar trill and the alveolar flap in Romanian, so whichever you pronounce, the word meanings won't change. If you trill too much you will give the impression of being somewhat emphatic, but that's about the worse that can happen.
There are Romanian speakers who don't pronounce the alveolar trill at all; many of them simply because they can't. Instead, some use the flap everywhere (and nobody notices), while others use the uvular trill (like French r's). In the latter case people do notice, but get easily used to it.
[flag]ro[/flag] maternă [flag]us[/flag] pretty well [flag]fr[/flag] pas mal [flag]ja[/flag] 順調