It’s interesting how difficult it is for us to roll our tongues to produce sounds that we didn’t learn to pronounce as kids. They say that learning pronunciation is the most difficult part of language learning after the so-called critical period has ended.

I, for example, grew up as a native Finnish speaker, and since Finnish has only one native sibilant sound (/s/, as in the English word “salt”), I still sometimes catch myself having difficulties pronouncing other sibilants such as those found in English (zoo, church, shoe, janitor, measure), even if English is today my everyday language. It’s not like I can’t pronounce the sounds, but I have noticed that if I’m for instance terribly tired, or translating between Finnish and English, it does happen. And in languages like Russian and Hungarian, which have pretty much the same set of sibilants, I struggle even more due to my being far less confident speaking them and therefore less sure which sibilant a word used.

A part of this is probably because of the language teaching methods in Finland, which don’t (or at least in my time didn’t) really deal with pronunciation.

Edit: Plus I was a lazy student. Let that not be forgotten.

Regarding the Czech ř, it apparently marks what we would technically call a raised alveolar trill (IPA symbol [r̝]).

Now, a “regular” alveolar trill (IPA [r]) is the “r” sound you have in many European languages such as Italian, Russian, Greek, Dutch, and a great number of others (such as Corsican French, apparently).

When it comes to English dialects, Scottish uses an alveolar trill, but regular British and American English do not — British English dialects tend to use an alveolar approximant instead, while dialects of American English use a retroflex approximant.

But if you can pronounce [r] (the alveolar trill, i.e. the “Scottish R”), try “raising” your tongue higher (closer to the highest point in your mouth, which also means that the part of your tongue that touches the roof of your mouth pulls back a little bit). As you do so, you will probably notice that you are no longer able to fully “trill” the sound, i.e. your tongue won’t repeatedly tap the roof of your mouth as it does with the regular trill [r]. Instead, the air will escape almost continuously, giving a very “s-like” quality to the sound (that is why the Czech [r̝] is called a partial fricative).

Wikipedia gives a recorded pronunciation of “Antonin Dvořak”, although to my ear it sounds like the female and the male examples actually differ quite a bit regarding their pronunciations of ř.

I have no idea if this has helped or just confused you more. As I am not really a phonologist, my insturctions may be neither fully scientific nor totally user-friendly. But at least I think that by following my own instructions I managed to pronounce the name of “Antonin Dvořak” like they do on the Wikipedia recording.

Let me know how you managed!

Thanks for the precision, Vili, I’m interested in these matters but am more at ease with writing than with pronunciation.
Recently again, I was unable to get a correct ř. (I was watching an interesting czech movie, Až přijde kocour and noticed that it was the same ř than in Dvořak, but that doesn’t make it easier to pronounce. )

About the main topic, maybe didn’t you notice that Criterion published a conversation with Teruyo Nogami.
And this time, it is explicitly mentioned that this conversation was done especially for the Criterion release, along with original sketches!

Fabien: I know some of IPA but I have yet to learn the meaning of ‘ and ,.

They are used to mark stress. A primary stress falls where I used the apostrophe and a secondary stress where I used the comma.

These stress markers actually have their own UTF symbols as well, but apostrophes and commas do the job just fine.

Sorry about the poor quality screenshot, but I think it’s enough for illustrative purposes here.

It’s awesome! But I can’t recall it at all.

Criterion will release the 16th of June its third volume of Essential Art House (the cheaper and novice-moviegoer-targeted collection), and this one will feature The Hidden Fortress (along with Richard III about which we talked not so long ago, in Shakespeare’s top adaptations, and other great movies, of course).

By the way, we get an interesting and unusual cover, showing all the main protagonists, as well as minor characters.