LingoflyRr rr — erre erre
«erre erre» is a digraph of the Basque script, read as “long rolled r”. A long trill — a Scottish rolled r, the tongue tip drumming several times. For example, in the word “gerra” — war. The Basque alphabet has 27 letters in total, and this character can be played right here. This character does not count as a letter of the alphabet. The pair tells words apart: ero ("crazy") with the short tap, erro ("root") with the full trill — the same contrast as in gerra, "war".
In short
| Character | Rr rr |
| Name | erre erre |
| Sound | long rolled r |
| What it is | a digraph |
In our course the character comes 20th of 32: the order here is not alphabetical but from familiar to unfamiliar, its neighbours in the course are r and s, appears in 544 words of this site.
How it sounds
A long trill — a Scottish rolled r, the tongue tip drumming several times
The character in a word
A lone character is hard to remember: memory holds on to meaning, and a letter has none. The word it stands in provides that anchor.
- gerrawar
The character in the “soft sounds and the trill” group
ñ and tt are palatal sounds with a y-glide; they grew out of baby talk and affectionate speech. A matching pair for tt exists for d too, but it is met only a handful of times. rr is a trill between vowels. No word begins with a trill. Native words never start with r, and borrowed ones get a vowel in front — errege, arrosa.
Words with this character
How to remember this character
A single letter is the hardest thing to remember: memory has nothing to hold on to — a character has no meaning. A three-step loop works: see the character, try to recall the sound (for «erre erre» it is “long rolled r”, as in the word “gerra”), see the right answer.
And come back to it the next day, not in an hour: a check a day or two later beats a check the same day. Nobody holds the whole alphabet — 27 letters — at once.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
Frequently asked
How does the Basque character rr read?
As “long rolled r” — it is a digraph of the Basque script. A long trill — a Scottish rolled r, the tongue tip drumming several times. For example, in the word “gerra” — war.
What is the sign rr called?
Erre erre. A character's name and its sound are different things in the Basque script: it is called “erre erre” and reads as “long rolled r”. Learn the second one: the name only helps when the alphabet is recited aloud.
What can rr be confused with?
The pair tells words apart: ero ("crazy") with the short tap, erro ("root") with the full trill — the same contrast as in gerra, "war". Similar characters are best studied side by side and deliberately compared: learned on different days, they stay separate and get mixed up at their first meeting inside a word.