¡Vamos a España!

"Do you have plans for fall of next year?" some good friends asked casually as we dined at a Chinese restaurant.  "Fall of 2014?  That's quite a ways away."  I answered.  "Well, how about joining us for a trip to Northern Spain?"  All I had to do was swallow my last bite of pork fried rice and glance at my husband for an okay before I responded "Great, let's do it."  And that's how our next travel (language) adventure began. 

I have always loved to travel, and I think I now know why.  It's not about adventure, because I am a conservative soul; it's not about fancy food and drink, because I don't drink and am always trying to diet; and it's not about meeting new people, because I am an introvert at heart.  But what travel does offer me is a great excuse to sit around and study other languages.  

Now I have the perfect reason to revive my Spanish.  It has lain dormant for quite a few years because I have been teaching undergraduate Portuguese language courses.  At one point in my life, the task was to take my Spanish and turn it into Portuguese.  I did that so successfully that now I still understand understand, read, and write Spanish fairly well, but when I try to speak, what emerges is Brazilian Portuguese.  Very embarrassing!  If the person I am speaking to is not familiar with Portuguese, they think I am speaking Spanish with a really strange accent.

/r/ 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Alveolar_trill.ogg

What has me most concerned is producing that trilled /r/ in Spanish. The sound is obligatory when a Spanish word is spelled with a double r.  When I was speaking Spanish on a regular basis, I could trill the /r/ at best 75% of the time.  Words like ferrocarril (railroad) I  tried to avoid altogether and instead substitute another word like tren.  I tried to never mention dogs (perros), although I am  a true animal lover, and I always used the more formal Spanish word coche for 'car' instead of carro, which is used in the Southwest.  I had to always be planning ahead to see what words with trilled /r/ sounds I could avoid.

One of the reasons I fell in love with the Portuguese language was because in most dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, that troublesome /r/ is not trilled.  It is made with a nice, easy sound, similar to a strong 'h' sound in English.  Ah, now that sound I can make.  When I visited Portugal, I heard the trilled /r/ again in European Portuguese, but I just ignored it and used my Brazilian dialect.  Problem solved!

All this kerfuffle over /r/ , you may be thinking at this point.  And you may be right.  After all, how important is perfect pronunciation if a person is communicating well anyway?  Some purists will insist that you must try to sound exactly like a native speaker of the language, but I believe that is an unreasonable goal for most language learners. 

Spanish subjunctive verbs don't scare me.  I can place double object pronouns in the right order and the right position.   Remembering which nouns are masculine and feminine holds no fear for me.  But oh that Spanish /r/!