I'm seriously considering doing it. If you don't know what it is, it's the strip that goes between your tongue and the floor of your mouth. As for my reasons, I really love languages and I really want to learn plenty of them when I have time. German, Japanese, French, maybe Russian, I simply want to be really multilingual and removing the frenulum makes your tongue so flexible that learning the specific sounds of foreign languages get's a lot easier. So I dunno, it feels like a good idea. Besides, I can think of some other, ahem, practical uses for a really long and extremely flexible tongue. Has anybody here done it or know somebody who has?
One of my sons couldn't pronounce his r's at all. So when we were in Singapore, we asked his dentist to remove it. The dentist couldn't understand why he would need to pronounce r's. well, he still couldn't pronounce his r's. Then we went to live in Mexico. He was in second grade, and in a Mexican school, so in a few months he was speaking Spanish just like all the kids in his class (we also spoke Spanish at home, so it was Spanish all the time for him in Mexico). His r's in Spanish were perfect, they were beautiful. But his r's in English never changed. I remember when I was young that a lot of people I knew when I lived in Argentina had this done, but I guess different people get different results. The biggest factor is in the brain, and it's hard to make a monolingual brain get a tongue to move perfectly in other languages, though you can get kind of close if you're immersed long enough.
When I was taking a speech pathology class the teacher told us that clipping the frenulum does absolutely nothing to help speech. She was extremely adamant about this. It was a long time ago and she was only one person, and maybe she was wrong, but I'm a little skeptical that it helps with language learning. If it does, I'd be tempted to get it myself because I cannot pronounce Rs in Spanish or German. Then again she also said it wouldn't hurt anything either, so there's that.
See, the thing about the tongue is that it's still a muscle and if it has kept doing an error like mispronouncing R's it will keep doing that until you train it away the way you'd train away an accent, clipping the frenulum makes it easier to train it away though. It's another story when you learn new stuff like new languages. Since it's new knowledge it will become much easier. Certain languages benefit more from it as well. Koreans, for example, tend to do it when learning English. In short, clipping the frenulum isn't a miracle cure-all for speech impediments but rather a way to "uncap the potential" so to speak. And again, there are other, more sexual uses.
that's definitely a new way to look at the importance of rolling your R's! Maybe I need to get my frenulum clipped too! :roflmao:
I have this, "tongue tied". I also in grade school had a horrible times pronouncing 'r' with 'w'. They suggested i get the skin clipped, but also said it wouldn't help. I went to speech and it improved, but to this day I still slip up if I am not thinking about it. Its really annoying now because it hurts to try to stick it out to far. Its a short little stubby thing... I was also considering getting it clipped and making life easier.
I just don't know if it would help! I cannot pronounc ethe letter "R" properly in italian/spanish, but can easily make a beautiful french "R" just by not moving my tongue at all, so I guess that, at least for french, you don't really need that kind of surgery. It sounds normal in English though. It's not that I physically can't pronounce it, I've just been doing it wrong for my entire life. You can already make all of the sounds that you need with your "regular" tongue. To make the italian/spanish "R" you have to place your tongue on the back of your top front teeth and make it vibrate. It takes a bit of practice, but even I could learn how to do it if I weren't so lazy.
