Pronunciation issues in spanish..."r". When did your children manage to make a nice "r" sound?

[Frescolita]

Looking for sane Spanish speaking mummies. How long did your kids need to pronounce the "r" sound?

My daughter is 2 and doing pretty well with Spanish (DH's mother tongue), English (me), and German (where we live, so what she gets at nursery). The problem is the "r" sound: "colle" instead of "corre", "awiba" instead of "arriba", and potentially more embarrasing is her pronunciation of the English word "fork" without the "r".

I'm concerned because I had a similar issue as a kid and ended up with a couple of speech therapy sessions until I could roll my "r"s. Or is 2 years old still too young to worry?

2 is too young to worry in any language. DS1's speech therapist advised me the 'r' and the 'l' are often the last to develop, sometimes its not til around 6 years old and thats quite normal. (he only speaks english though).

At age two, it is too young to worry.

It's good that speech therapy helped you, I had four years of therapy and still can't roll my 'r's. Not a problem in english, but it is a problem in other languages.

What does the nursery say?

Thanks Juniper and kelda. Will try and not worry for now. Nursery aren't very helpful, as the lovely ladies there are German speakers, and mostly impressed that DD "already speaks some English". hummm.

I don't use a 'rrrr' in fork. It's 'fawk' when I say it, so you may find it's less of a problem than you anticipate on that front.

In english, it's really not a problem. But I speak dutch and for that, it is a problem. People really struggle to understand me because I am lacking in that one sound. I think it can be a problem in Spanish (I beleive there are two sounds - r and rr) and German, so it is something to keep an eye on. At around age 4 if she is still not saying it, look at getting speech therapy, as it can take a while to get speech therapy sorted.

I worried about this as my DD couldn't say her Greek r, which is very similar to the Spanish one. She was saying "l", like yours. Then, shortly after her 4th birthday she suddenly said it after a "t" sound and within a few weeks it was all sorted. Like yours, she is trilingual. She still has a "w" for her English "r", but can make the right sound if she tries really hard so i'm sure it won't be long (she's 4 and a half).
Incidentally, I spoke to people about this a lot in Greece (because like you, where I live they wouldn't have experience of the exact sounds that my child wasn't doing right) and read some stuff about language development in Greek which seemed to indicate that some time around 6 was the time to be concerned about the "r" sound.

"2 is too young to worry in any language. DS1's speech therapist advised me the 'r' and the 'l' are often the last to develop, sometimes its not til around 6 years old and thats quite normal"
I agree with this. However, there might be a short frenulum if the "rr" is not developed at all by age, say, 4 (very precise, i know!), which can be cut by a doctor in about half a second with no preparation whatsoever and will help loads. My son had a short frenulum, which was cut as I say (spat a bit of blood for a minute and then had an icecream), and was rolling "r"s like a pro after just a few weeks. If there were breastfeeding problems tht could be a hint regading the frenulum.
Speech therapy cannot help if the problem is physical, like the aforementioned frenulum,.. I had several cousins who did ST for years and still cannot roll an r as adults (we all speak Spanish).

my DS started pronouncing the Spanish r properly age 5. Even though he is bilingual, you can still hear a slight accent when he speaks Spanish.

Same here. With my son (bilingual in English and Spanish), the "r" sound was one of the last ones to develop. It happened when he was around 4-5 yr old (about a year ago when he was in reception).

I once found a chart with the approximate times where it was normal to master different types of sounds (and I think it was in Spanish), and was surprised to see that the "r" was one of the last sounds, and around that age (5-6 years old). So it is perfectly normal for a 2 year old.

Thank you all! 4 years more before I panic then... In the meantime DD has started to use a german "r" in spanish words, which is driving DH nuts. I find it funny, as she sounds like a little german talking spanish.