Can you roll your "r"s?

We recently discovered that one of our daughters could not roll her "r"s! Having a Scottish father, should she not be an expert at this?  Apparently not.

  Initially I wondered if this was one of those things that you either can or can't do genetically - like curling your tongue as in the picture.  I remember being taught about that in Biology at high school - this was the example used to demonstrate genetic traits! (although I see that there is some dispute over whether or not genetics is solely responsible for this useful?? ability!)

But back to being able to roll your "r"s.  Have you ever tried to tell someone how to do this?  Not so easy to describe! So I turned to Google!  Wikihow has a great article with 5 different 'methods' to learn how to roll your "r"s! Who would have thought? From the 'tiger' method, to the 'Raspberry' method.   

We had some fun as as family - trying to follow the various instructions - and all being very 'helpful' to our older daughter who couldn't roll her "r"s naturally. 

I think it's a matter of finding which instructions make sense to you and working with that.  The method that worked in the end, was the 'dR' method, which is apparently the one Lenin used!  Our daughter found straight away that she could, in fact, roll her "r"s when saying the word "dracula"!!  So now she has a word to start from to practice using those muscles so necessary when trying to imitate Dad's Scottish accent!

So - go on, have a try! Can you roll your "r"s??