How to pronounce conditional retirar and incluir

I don't understand why people say Spanish pronunciation is easy!!!

I've studied the language for 3 semesters and I found out yesterday that some r's are pronounced like a d.

Can someone break down the pronounciation of the conditional retirar and incluir in english for me.

For example, pe - do is the word pero or but.

Is incluiria.... In - clue - ear - e -a

and is retiraria.... RR - et - e - da - d -a


Please help as I am struggling with these types of words.

This thread needs to be in the Language forum.

It's not necessarily a "d" sound. Because the Spanish R is an alveolar trill, a short trill sounds similar to a d because the tongue is hitting the alveolar ridge.

So what's the solution? When a word starts with an R, the R has a longer trill. When the R is in the middle of the word or at the end of a word, the trill is shorter and sounds close to a D, but not quite.

Meesh.

<<For example, pe - do is the word pero or but.

Is incluiria.... In - clue - ear - e -a

and is retiraria.... RR - et - e - da - d -a >>

Yeah it's not exactly a 'd', however let me tell you that some children tend to pronounce it like a 'd' or even omit it completely in early stages of their language learning. I'd say it's fairly difficult to pronounce the 'r' and 'rr' sounds because the tongue requires some strength that children don't have. But here's my answer to the question.

r .- is an alveolar tap, pronounced similarly to the flapped sound of intervocalic 't' and 'd'. It's used between vowels, at the end of most words, especially verbs, and in consonant clusters before or after other letters, but it depends on the accent.

It's like the the tipped sounds of the 'r' that can be heard in some Scottish accents, or in ultra posh English accents, in the word 'very'.
Eg:

r - ere

pero
trabajar*
arco
puerto
arbol

rr.- A bit difficult for children to master, when they can't pronounce it they're teased because of speaking with a "French" flair. And very difficult for English speakers as well, who usually fail and use their normal 'r' sound, which gets quite difficult to understand when they have some non-rothic accent. We make people practice on this by telling them to imitate the growling of a dog saying the 'rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr' sound, with a special emphasis in the vibrating quality of this sound.
It's used when you see double 'r', that's 'rr'. And also, as a allophone of 'r' in word initial positions. In compound words that have a latin or geek prefix ending in a consonant before the 'r' it is realised as 'rr'.Eg:

rr - erre

perro
carro
arriba**
subrayar

Something you need to notice and practice is the rifferent realisation of these rothic sounds in Spanish when they are found in intervocalic position:

r - rr
caro - carro
pero - perro

So to finally answer your question, say that 'r' is the alveolar tip, and 'R' is the alveolar thrill, your words would be something like:

incluiría .- een - klwee - 'ree - ah

retiraría .- Reh - tee - rah - 'ree - ah

remember that the 'clui' bit in 'incluiría' would be a dipthong, so must be said together as one syllable, otherwise it sounds weird. Especially due to the strong dipthongising (if such a word exists) of Spanish.

Here's a recording containing all the examples above, I've made it myself and I'm from Peru.

Click this link:

http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc//home

-Click 'Sign in': I'll share this account with you, whenever I want to show you a recording or something, the account is:

name: pedro_neo_briefcase
password: cockney

-click the folder 'Mis documentos'

-click the only file so far, r - rr.mp3, to download. And listen.

that's that, I hope you find this helpful, mate

Pete de Perú

PS.- Sorry if the Yahoo briefcase was too long, but I didn't find any other hosting site better than this, if anyone can suggest a better one, I'll be grateful.

<<Something you need to notice and practice is the rifferent realisation of these rothic sounds in Spanish>>

It's not 'rifferent' it should be 'different'

By the way, there were some * I intentionally placed by certain words because I wanted to explain the realisation the 'r' sound in certain accents changes a lot, and it may be confusing for someone who is not exposed to that particular dialect. I've had problems with Puerto Rico and Cuban accents myself, because of what they do to the 'r' and 's' stuff.

The same word 'puerto' can sometimes come as if it were 'puelto', I remember a friend of mine who sometimes said 'mal' (evil) for 'mar' (sea).

Well, that's regarding the 'r'. But they also have some intervocalic 's' aspiration which is common in Venezuelan and some Norhthern Colombian accents as well, and makes "Las hijas de mi primo son mis sobrinas" sound like "Lah hijah de mi primo son mis sobrinas". That, along with the 'j' aspiration, usually throws me off, and can be confusing for speakers of other languages. Especially for me, in my Peruvian dialect, there's no intervocalic 's' aspiration, and but this aspiration is very strong when the 's' sound is before 'k' or 'c', in words like 'risco', 'pisco', 'Cuzco'.

I mean it's not like we don't understand what they say, we can still pick up most words and make out the general sense of what they say. Working class accents tend to be stronger everywhere, I don't know why.

Pete

There is no such a difference between R and D. It's only that you must have heard people speaking wrongly, maybe from the Caribbean area or Chile. You do pronounce Spanish as it is written. That's it.

<<There is no such a difference between R and D.>>

What do you mean? Maybe you should be more precise. You are right in saying that Spanish follows a more consistent spelling system with accurate rules, but... For me there's all the world a difference between R and D. I'm a native speaker of Spanish and in it's very different to say:

PERO .- but or PEDO .- flart

Do you see? those are completely different in pronunciation and meaning.


Pete from Peru