Hello! I've been a teacher on italki for over 3 years and in my opinion one of the most challenging topics for pronunciation is trying to explain to my Chinese native speaking students how to pronounce the "r" sound in English. I've recently dabbled in Mandarin and something I've found interesting is that there is a very similar sound to the American-English "r" already in that language. A good example is the characters for the word "son" (pinyin- erzi). The beginning part of the word features a very hard "r". Is it helpful for native Chinese speakers to think of that sound when pronouncing words like "right", "ridge", "ripple", et cetera? I know when learning foreign languages, it's helpful for me to relate the pronunciation to sounds found in my native language if at all possible. Feel free to comment, I'd like to see what the consensus is. 🙂