Foreign Language Tongue Twisters

If you want students to practice their pronunciation and to have fun while doing it, try out some tongue-twisters.  This is a great way to have students focus on their pronunciation without relying on repetition.  It’s fun to make it into a game and see who can say it the fastest.  Once students get more comfortable with the pronunciation they can begin to make their own tongue-twisters in the target language.  This would be a great opportunity to see if students understand the sound-symbol relationship between letters, letter combinations, or characters.  Very often as well, the content of the tongue-twister is a window into the culture.

Here are some tongue-twisters to get you started:

Rao k’ou ling (Mandarin)

Tongue-Twisters (English)

Virelangues (French)

Zungenbrecher (German)

Scioglilingua (Italian)

Hayakuchi Kotoba (Japanese)

Trava Linguas (Portuguese)

Trabalenguas (Spanish)