Something that I always get hung up on, and it may or may not be kind of trivial, is when I’m thinking a sentence and not saying it out loud, is how I’m supposed to roll my r’s in my head…? Or, do I just not do that, mentally?
I deleted emojis, so *shrugs*
Oooooh I'm not the only one who thinks about this too!
I didn't even know how to roll my r's for years, into my late teens. Part of why I took French in school instead of other languages is because I could actually pronounce the French r's.
But I love the sound of tapped and trilled r's, especially in Icelandic and Welsh (oh god, the voiceless ones especially hhhhhhhhhhhh). They are sensory bliss to my ears. I specifically listened to Sigur Rós obsessively trying to mimic the sounds and figure out how to do it. I'd find vocabulary lists in languages I liked, try to listen to them and mimic them, over and over for years. I'd exhaust myself trying, not get it, feel discouraged, and stop for a time. But always come back.
And then one day I'm looking at Swedish words, not really paying attention but just saying words casually, and I hit 'bröd' (bread) and my tongue just rrrrrrrrrrred. I think I jumped and almost knocked something over; I was so startled that I had finally done it without trying, but I didn't know what it would feel like? I took a pause to process, and then tried it again - and did it again!
And since then I've just gotten better and better at it. I still have days where I can't, and I have trouble doing it after certain sounds ([d], [t], [s], [θ], and [ð], and in consonant clusters of languages like Georgian and the Western South Slavics in the Balkans).
It's still very much a sound that doesn't yet feel like mine. I don't even mean that in a possessive way, I think I just mean that I don't have an intimate connection to the sound, so I can't hear it in my mind's voice. I always have to substitute it with an audio memory of someone else making the sound. If I decide to have my mind's voice affect an accent, then I can hear it. (I'm very good at accents...in my head.) But that's still a sense of Not Me.
It depends on the language as well. If I've heard enough of a given language, I have enough audio memory to sound things out in my head before attempting to speak them. If not, then I won't hear anything in my head. Like, I was looking at Armenian words the other day on Wiktionary. I haven't memorised the alphabet, so I was looking at IPA transcriptions. But I've never heard Armenian before. So, even with the IPA transcriptions, and seeing symbols for tapped or trilled r's, I heard nothing in my head. I can't bring an Icelandic or Finnish audio memory into Armenian; I've got to find Armenian audio and make memories from that.
So, depending on how you are and what works for you, you might try using audio memories in your thoughts like I do. If you need to feel the sound and you're just not there yet, audio memories are a good substitute.
And I guess we'll see if r and I ever truly fall in love.
But what I really want to know: how the fuck do people whisper tapped and trilled r's. That boggles my damn mind. *confused face*