An American Tries French Tongue Twisters

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Tongue twisters are hard enough in your own language. In another language, they’re nearly impossible.

Most English speakers grow up knowing the classic tongue twisters like “Sally sells seashells on the seashore” and “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” But just like other aspects of language such as idioms and proverbs, each language has their own batch of tongue twisters.

In French, instead of saying you have a frog in your throat when you’ve got a cough, you say you have a cat in your throat (avoir un chat dans la gorge). And instead of “Sally sells seashells on the seashore,” a classic French tongue twister incorporates a similar confusion of sounds but with a completely different sentence, like, “Suis-je bien chez ce cher Serge?”

Laughing at tongue twisters goes beyond language barriers, which YouTube vloggers MATH (who is French) and Moretoki (who is American) learned when they met up to trade tongue twisters in English and French, making one truly hilarious video:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PaFrscbakM&w=560&h=315]

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