Today we are going to learn the pronunciation for the letter ‘R’ in European Spanish and we are going to use a little bit of IPA.

The letter R has 2 very distinctive pronunciations:
The first one is /r/ a strong rolling R and it used when:
it is at the beginning of a word like in: ratón, risa,
when it is duplicated, like in: correr, tarro,
when it is preceded with the letters n, l o s, like in: enredo, alrededor or israel
or by the prefixes ab, sub, y post like in: abrogar, subrayar, or postromantico

The second one is /ɾ/ a soft sound and it is used when
when it is surrounded by vowels like in: cara or ira
or in a middle of a syllable like in: precio, tronco, droga or at the end of a syllable like in perder, poder

It is also specially important to notice that these 2 sounds are totally different to the R sound usually used in English.

There is a version of this video in Spanish.