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The little stint I had working under the table at a Chinese-American restaurant, hearing snippets of Cantonese was honestly a pleasure. So many beautiful languages and dialects in China, and I don’t understand a syllable of any of them.
i have to practice rolling my r’s a bit, not just for Chinese. since the word for ‘hot’ is a tougher r sound if one only speaks english:
热茶 rè chá
The r isn’t a roll so much s a strong(er) fricative, closer to the English zh but with a retroflex placement of the tongue tip
This description made a sound I’ve heard in others’ pronunciation suddenly make sense, thank you!
If you want to be more precise about your pronunciations, you should look into the International Phonetic Alphabet. It took me way too long to figure out how to pronounce the Chinese R, only to realize I could have simply learned IPA first instead
My pleasure! The Chinese language wiki is always helpful for these slightly familiar but slightly odd sounds. Here’s their entry for the Chinese piyin r initial.
I’ll add that from my experience there’s a lot of variation depending on the speaker, some add more buzz, others less but the general tongue positioning is consistent.
But yk what fuck it if you want to trill or roll your rs in 热茶 why not. It sounds cool.
