A Polish tongue twister

September 10, 2013 • 3:29 am

I am told that this Polish sentence is regularly used to flummox non-native speakers. I have heard it pronounced, and believe me, it’s impossible:

“W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie.”

English translation: “In Szczebrzeczyn [the name of the town], a beetle is sounding in the reeds.”
This comes from a verse by the famous Polish poet Jan Brzechwa called—get this—Chrząszcz. According to Wikipedia:

The name Szczebrzeszyn is infamous for being very difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers. The line [in the poem] with Szczebrzeszyn goes like this:

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie [the pronunciation can be heard here]

This roughly translates to: “In [the town of] Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed”. The phrase has been incorporated in everyday language as an epitome of Polish tongue twisters, and is often presented by natives to foreign learners of Polish. A monument depicting a beetle playing the violin that was erected in Szczebrzeszyn refers to the poem.

Here’s a photo of the statue from the Polish Wikipedia:

800px-PL_Szczebrzeszyn_town_hall

We have a lot of readers from different countries, so I’ll ask you to supply your nation’s most famous tongue twister in the comments below.
According to the Guinness Book of World records, this sentence is the toughest one in English:

“The Sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” 

You can see more English tongue twisters here.

76 thoughts on “A Polish tongue twister”

    1. I can’t say it, but it’s delicious!

      (I hope that’s “red pudding with cream” – its been decades since I’ve been in your fine land. )

      1. It is. Sweet and creamy.

        Haven’t had it for years though, so maybe it’s time for a revival. 🙂

  3. Here’s one that you can’t say no matter how slow you try to say it. You have to practice it.

    “The sea ceaseth and sufficeth us.” Read it as slowly as you want, you will say the “the sea ceathes and suffithus us.” If you change the cadence, it helps: “The Sea CEA-ses and etc.”

    I’ve never met anyone who could say this right the first time. I could only say it after practicing it several times.

  4. I did learn Polish for a couple of years at evening class back in the 80s but I never had the impetus of a visit to continue, so while I can pronounce it OK I have sadly forgotten most of what I learnt! Now replaced with Norwegian in my tiny brain…

  5. Speaking of Guinness, after 9 pints or so, I often find that ‘Another pint please, bartender’ is nigh on impossible to pronounce. As is ‘where is the door?’

  6. Here’s a German one I was taught by a friend long ago:

    Der Leutnant von Leuthen befahl seinen Leuten nicht eher zu läuten, bis er, der Leutnant von Leuthen, seinen Leuten das Läuten befahl.

    Translation: The lieutenant from Leuthen commanded his people not to sound off before he, the lieutenant from Leuthen, gave his people the command to sound off.

    1. It’s easy if you don’t think of the meaning of the words and just concentrate on the pronunciation.

  7. So its to non-native Polish speakers as Noodle or Poodle are to English speaking telemarketers. Well, I’ve got something else to use to screw with their heads, if I learn Polish and they happen to have somebody capable of speaking it.

  8. “Scheveningen” – name of a town in the Netherlands. Word used by dutch forces in 1940 to identify german infiltrators…….a funny scene in “Soldat van Oranje”.

  9. In Latvian, we have something like this:

    “Glāžšķūņu rūķīši snauž uz šaursliežu dzelzceļa”

  11. One more in German, not a very famous one but one I like for it’s content, by Georg Winter:

    In dem Lichte griechischer Berichte über türkische Geschichte ist der Türke nur ein Schurke, wie der Grieche in dem Lichte türkischer Berichte über griechische Geschichte.

    (In the light of greek reports about turkish history, the turk is just a villain, as is the greek in the light of turkish reports about greek history).

    For a native speaker, the most difficult part is to get the order right, but any english speaking persons are invited to try – all the ‘ch’-sounds are pronounced like in ‘Bach’.

    I can’t find a recording of this very one, but here is Georg Winter reciting his own tongue twisters in a gameshow: [http://]www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Io0SOkvsY

  12. I see that Wikipedia has an article on tongue-twitchers with multiple examples:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue-twister

    The one given for my own language (French) is one I’ve never heard before:

    “Tata, ta tarte tatin tenta Tonton, Tonton tâta ta tarte tatin, Tata.” (Aunty, your apple tart tempts Uncle; Uncle has touched your apple tart, Aunty.)

    The most famous one may be this one:

    “Un chasseur sachant chasser chasse sans son chien” (A hunter who knows how to hunt, hunts without his dog)
    There’s many variations on this one.

  13. I like “Sju skönsjungande sjuksköterskor skötte sjuttiosju sjösjuka sjömän på skeppet Shanghai”. Swedish: not my native language, not my best, , not my easiest but my favourite and one I know reasonably well.

    Note: In the above sentence, “sj”, “sk” and “sh” are all pronounced the same. In some dialects of Swedish, it is similar to the English “sh”, French “ch” or German “sch”. In others, it is similar to the German “ch” in “Bach”, though in German this appears only at the end of a syllable and here it is at the beginning. (Or it is like an unvoiced version of “G” from the north of the Netherlands.) This latter variant of the sound is sometimes never mastered by non-native speakers, not even in one-syllable words, much less tongue twisters.

    1. Yes, that is a good one.

      Another hilarious one: Eyjafjallajökull

      Watching the dread in the eyes of international news achors the seconds leading up to another anouncement concerning “that volcano”, and the following ‘calamity’, was a great show 🙂

    2. Or if you have trouble with that you can start with the Level 1 version: Sju sjuksköterskor skötte sju sjösjuka sjömen.

      When I was learning Swedish, I used to practice that sj sound at night while waiting for the bus. It involves use of throat muscles, and it also helps your jaw and lips set just right since there’s a certain rush of air that’s part of the sound. I’ve been told that in Swedish primary schools students are evaluated for their ability to make the sound.

      (The SJ on the side of Swedish trains has nothing to do with this.)

    3. Oops, I somehow missed this comment before appending my own to the end.

      The full version goes like that, and it is hard. I described the shortened version, and why it is often heard on school yards.

    4. I’ve never had a problem with that tongue-twister, although it’s undoubtedly the most well-known.

      Now, this one has to come second in popularity:

      “Sex laxar i en lackask.” (“Six salmons in a laquer box.”)

      Being a native Swedish speaker, I can not for the sake of anything pronounce this correctly: it always ends up ebing something akin to: “Sex laxar i en laxask.” (“Six salmons in a salmon-box.”).

  14. In french, we have the following:
    “Un chasseur sachant chasser doit savoir chasser sans son chien”
    which literally translates as:
    “A hunter knowing how to hunt should know how to hunt without his dog”

    another famous one is:
    “Les chaussettes de l’archiduchesse sont-elles sèches et archi-sèches ?”
    which goes:
    “Are the archduchess’ socks dry or archi-dry?”

    Both of which seem to me vastly easier to say than the polish example Jerry quoted (even though, being french obviously I’m biased)

    1. argh, you beat me.

      My wife made me read the polish example on sunday. Even with my improving polish, it was nightmarish. My daughter(perfectly bilingual) was laughing from beginning to end.

    2. archi-dry still has a rather French ring to it. Maybe ‘ultra-dry’ would be a better translation? Nice tongue-twister though!

      1. Absolutely right Jonathan, I hesitated to translate it as ultra-dry, feeling that it sounded more english but thought erroneously that archi also existed in english. Also the “et” in the french twister should be replaced by “ou” (or)…

  15. This was described as a Czech tongue twister in Ripley’s Believe It or Not:

    Strč prst skrz krk.

    Ripleys gave its translation as “thrust finger through neck”, but, less literally, it means, “Stick (your) finger down (your) throat). It’s not so much a tongue twister as is is difficult because it appears to be devoid of vowels. However, [r] is, phonetically, a syllabic semivowel, and some languages, Czech included, build syllables around such sounds.

    An American actor whose name escapes me is said to have walked off the set of a radio drama when he was handed a script which contained the line,

    “Show me the chair Schmidt was sitting in when he was shot.”

  16. Three in spanish:

    1. Pablito clavó un clavito, qué clavito clavó Pablito?

    – Pablito nailed a nail, which nail Pablito nailed?

    2. Tres tristes tigres comían trigo en tres tristes platos.

    -Three sad tigers ate weath in three sad dishes.

    3. Poco coco como porque poco coco compro.

    – Little coconuts I eat because little coconuts I buy.

    2. I always came across #2 as
      “Tres tristes tigres tragaban trigo en un trigal”
      – Three sad tigers swallowed wheat in a wheat field.

  17. By coincidence QI last weekend had a Finnish tongue twister – “Kokko, kokoa kokoon koko kokko. Koko kokkoko? Koko kokko.” “Kokko, build up the whole bonfire. The whole bonfire? (Yes) The whole bonfire.”
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJssBOTP058&list=TLGU6XuZohYiA

    This is a bit like the buffalo sentence –
    Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo. = Bison from upstate New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also intimidate other bison who are intimidated by other bison in their community.

  19. A classic German one I learned from my mother:

    Fishers Fritz fischte frische Fische, frische Fische fischte Fishers Fritz.

    Two classic Italian ones:

    Sopra la panca la capra campa, sotto la panca la capra crepa.

    Trentatré trentini entrarono a Trento tutti e trentatré trotterellando allegramente.

    In my local northern Lombard dialect:

    Ti che ti tàchet i tacch, tacum i tacch! Mi ch’a tachi i tacch, go de tacàtt i tac a ti che ti tachet i tac? Tàchet ti i to tac!

    1. I learned a variation on the German one: Fischers Fritz ißt frische Fische, frische Fische ißt Fischers Fritz.

  21. Obviously you didn’t go to a Catholic school with about half the student body was polish. They (the school) brought in somebody to speak at our commencement who hadn’t either; his attempts to call the students to come and get their diplomas resembled a Marx brothers movie. Especially when the the other half of the students had a substantial percentage of Viet Names,

  23. One apparently simple name that I find surprisingly difficult is that of the only female pharaoh: Hatshepsut.

  24. The polish sentence is easy for someone like me who attended St. Mary of Czestochowa grade school for eight years. The parish church is just down the street from the Leszczynski funeral home. One of the parish priests was Father Grndzlewski and the sermon at the 10:00 AM Sunday mass was delivered in Polish.

    1. You are missing some vowels from Grndzlewski. Not pronounceable in Polish. It was probably something like Grundzielewski.

      1. That is how he spelled it. He pronounced it gin-ge-LEV-ski and most people called him “Father Ginger”. He was the one priest at that parish I could suspect of having been frisky with the altar boys.

  25. An original inspired by this post.

    Plucky Polly pleasantly polished her Polish pleasing the Pollack people who promptly placed her in proud proximity to their unpronouncable poet.

  26. English and Polish are both first languages for me. I was born in Chicago and learned both languages at the same time. And I went to Polish school on Saturdays. My mother was Irish and did not speak Polish. I find Polish much easier than English. All those consonants strung together are actually easy to pronounce if you have spoken the language since you could speak (and learn how to roll your r’s.) Polish is rule driven with well defined ways to conjugate verbs and declension of nouns. English is mostly exceptions with a few rules. Words are spelled differently and sound the same. There is not set pronunciation of different vowels – and even consonants. I took Latin in high school. It was easy for me to learn. Polish is structured the same way. The kids who knew only English had a hard time. They had to learn about a structured language as well as the language itself.

    For immigrants, learning English as an adult is very difficult and few will learn it well. Yet somehow, Americans have turned it into the international lingua franca. A benefit from being rich and powerful with a refusal to learn other languages – you have to learn ours. And if you don’t speak English, we will just talk LOUDER and s l o w e r.

    1. I don’t think it was Americans that turned English into the international language. Years of British colonization probably got that one off to a good start.

      Since the mid 20th century, certainly the US and UK media cemented the deal, but it started long before then 🙂

    2. George, you need to read Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention. Most of the notions you have about language, rules and structure are just plain wrong. All languages are structured, even English, although it is frequently the case that the structure and features of one’s native languages blind one to the structures and features of other languages.

      I once compared the Slavic languages to Welsh: “A gang of consonants in search of their vowels”.

      1. I’m afraid I can’t resist pointing out that the notion you have about Welsh is plain wrong;) Welsh has *more* vowel letters than English, not fewer. English speakers sometimes think that Welsh words lack vowels because they’re spelled with letters that, in English, are considered consonants, but in Welsh represent vowels (e.g. w and y in clwyf). There’s also a greater in Welsh tendency to use digraphs (e.g. ll, dd, ff) and even trigraphs (ngh) to represent single consonants. But it’s not really different from using “th” and “ng” to represent single consonants in English.

        Really we should restrict the terms “consonant” and “vowel” to discussions of sounds, not letters. After all, “y” represents vowels quite a lot of the time in English too.

        1. I’d even go as far as to say that “vowellessness” in more common in English than in Welsh. Most English speakers, for example, pronounce the second syllable of “table” with a syllabic consonant, but no vowel. Such syllables are much less common in Welsh.

          2. I’m afraid you’re replying to a postscript to a longer comment, where I make that distinction myself. For some reason my original comment still awaits moderation.

  27. Some populars “trabalenguas” in Spanish are:

    Pablito clavó un clavito en la calva de un calvito.

    -Compadre cómpreme un coco. -Compadre no compro coco, porque como poco coco como, poco coco compro.

    Cuando cuentes cuentos cuenta cuantos cuentos cuentas porque si no cuentas cuantos cuentos cuentas nunca sabras cuantos cuentos contaste.

    Cheers

  28. Let me add one from Danish.

    Apparently, the ‘soft d’ is hard to learn for foreigners because it isn’t quite one of the ‘th’ sounds from English. And apparently, one of our ‘l’ sounds is very close to the soft d.
    Let’s top it of with some vowels, too, since we have so many.

    Try saying: “idel ædel adel” (ever noble nobility) or “liderlig adelig” ((a) horny noble).

    Or this sentence in a dialect from Jutland:
    “a æ u å æ ø i æ å!” (I’m on the island in the stream)

    1. The Scandinavian sound represented by ‘d’ is a dental voiceless stop. In English, ‘d’ is used to show an alveolar voiceless stop.

        1. I was wrong in one thing – ‘d’ is a voiced not a voiceless, stop (it’s the ‘t’ that’s voiceless – I miswrote). ‘d’ is definitely not a continuant, but is phonetically described as a stop, aka obstruent, aka occlusive. “Soft” is not a term used to describe the phonemic values of consonants.

    2. The Jutland dialect seems fraught with the same difficulties that Sweden’s dialect from Värmland has, which has been rather isolated for geographical reasons (IIRC).

      One of our great authors, Gustaf Fröding, immortalized this dialect in his collection of poetry and prose “Räggler å paschaser”.

      It’s a story about a local man that describes the silliness of “edumacated people”, when they don’t get a simple description: ” … å i åa ä e ö”. (… and in the stream is an island).

      PS We have the expression “idel ädel adel” too!

    3. It can be made even longer, can’t it?

      A æ u å æ ø i æ å, æ i å u å æ ø i æ å?

      Danish is the logical opposite of Czech or Tashlhiyt Berber, where you can have full-lenght sentences with no vowels.

      2. That would be the phonetic opposite, not the logical opposite, and it’s not entirely true, since both Czech and Berber use semivowels (such as [r]) to define syllables, whereas Germanic languages do not. Furthermore, Berber has frequent instances of epenthetic vowels, which are represented in the spoken forms but may not be reflected in the written or transliterated forms.

        1. both Czech and Berber use semivowels (such as [r]) to define syllables, whereas Germanic languages do not.

          I didn’t claim Czechs and Berbers had sentences without syllables, only that they could form a whole sentence without any vowels. It isn’t quite true either that the Germanic languages don’t employ consonants as syllable nuclei. Most of them (including colloquial Danish) do have syllabic liquids and nasals in unstressed positions (English bottle, listen, rhythm). From the articulatory point of view, the General American rhotic vowel is a syllabic liquid as well, not only in father etc., but also when stressed (bird, worry); so is the frequent realisation of /ʊl/ (bull, wolf, full) in many accents.

  29. In Chinese there is “44 stone lions”:

    四十四隻石獅子

    Which is pronounced:

    Sìshísì zhī shí shīzi

    and “four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty, forty-four is forty-four”:

    四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十，四十四是四十四
    Sì shì sì, shí shì shí, shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí, sìshísì shì sìshísì

    Sometimes people will combine them, also with death, which sounds like “sǐ”. Something along the lines of “four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty, forty-four stone lions died”.

    But one of the most gratuitous ones I’ve ever heard of in Chinese is the lion eating poet in the stone den:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

    All of these are in Mandarin. They become exacerbated when spoken by those with a southern regional accent in Mandarin (for example, those who speak the Hokkien/Taiwanese language as their primary language at home). All of the H’s get dropped, more or less, and it becomes even more difficult to say clearly.

  30. A popular tongue twister among children goes in several versions akin to this:

    “Sju sjösjuka sjömän på skeppet “Shanghai”.”

    The trick that amuses children is that when repeated fast several times most people get stuck on “sjösjuka” (sea sick). It then tend to get out like “sjökuka” or “skökuka”. Which’s parts reminds of old words for male genital parts or women in the oldest business…

  31. Of course there are a number of tongue twisters that have Freudian consequences, as in:

    I’m not a fig plucker, I’m not a fig plucker’s son, but I’ll pluck figs until the fig plucker comes

    and

    I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit, upon a slitted sheet I sit.

  32. I was surprised that this English tongue-twister doesn’t seem to be included in any of the lists. I was told long ago that the British Police used it as a test for sobriety before the days of breath tests, etc. “The Leith Police dismisseth us”. (Leith being a town in Scotland.) The problem is that most people can’t say it correctly when they’re sober!

  33. A couple of Norwegian ones, perhaps not as hard as some others:

    “Ibsens ripsbusker og andre buskvekster”

    and “Pappa pakker pappesker”.

    Like most of tounge twisters, they are supposed to be said quickly and repeatedly.

  34. Here are some more German Zungenbrecher (tongue breaker):

    Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid
    (red cabbage stays red cabbage and weddingdress stays weddingdress)

    And this one… try it with braces in your mouth and remember z is pronounced tz in German

    Zehn zahme Ziegen zogen zehn Zentner Zucker zum Zoo.
    (Ten tame goats pulled 10 tons of sugar to the zoo.)

  35. My ex was taking her Masters a few years back, which included a course in foreign languages. For one exercise she was given sound bites of phrases that she had to try to repeat. I helped her out by breaking them down into individual parts that could be pronounced. Most of them weren’t a problem (I could do the Polish tongue twister for instance ie. Steb ze shin yeh showft shmift chin yeh). However there was one sample, Ethiopian I think, that defied my analysis. It was the equivalent of taking the Polish tongue twister and playing it fast with no gaps between words. I just threw up my hands in defeat.

  36. Singers do tongue twisters during warm-up to limber up.

    “My mother makes me mash my mini M & Ms on a Monday morning”, sung on a single note and going up a semi-tone at the end to repeat.

    “A proper cup of coffee in a proper coffee cup” is another one, that usually has a tune. And finally “Diction is done with the tip of the tongue and the teeth.”

    All of them are sung at top speed and rising or falling a semi-tone between iterations.

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