VERBAVIA

Tongue twisters in different languages

Tongue twisters in different languages each go after the sounds that language finds hardest to say fast. Spanish has "Tres tristes tigres", built on tr; German has "Fischers Fritz", built on f and sch; French has "les chaussettes de l'archiduchesse", built on s against ch; and Mandarin has 四是四, built on s against sh and on tones. Below are the famous ones in eight languages, each with a translation and a note on the sound that trips people up, plus te reo Māori twisters from New Zealand's Ministry of Education and what happens to the Mandarin one in Shanghainese.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 5 min read

Spanish: tres tristes tigres

Tres tristes tigres tragaban trigo en un trigal.

Three sad tigers were swallowing wheat in a wheat field.

The hard sound: the tr cluster, five times in nine words, with a tapped Spanish r inside it. The Spanish t is made with the tongue against the teeth, and the r is a single quick tap, so the English tr of tree is not quite right.

German: Fischers Fritz

Fischers Fritz fischt frische Fische, frische Fische fischt Fischers Fritz.

Fisherman's Fritz fishes fresh fish; fresh fish is what Fisherman's Fritz fishes.

The hard sound: f followed by sch, the German "sh", switching back and forth in short words, with the cluster -scht at the end of fischt. Another German favourite turns two near-identical words against each other: Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid ("red cabbage stays red cabbage and a wedding dress stays a wedding dress").

French: les chaussettes de l'archiduchesse

Les chaussettes de l'archiduchesse sont-elles sèches, archi-sèches ?

Are the archduchess's socks dry, extra-dry?

The hard sound: ch (said "sh") against s, alternating in nearly every word. An older version, sung by Ray Ventura's band, asked about the archduchess's chemises, her shirts. The other French classic is Un chasseur sachant chasser doit savoir chasser sans son chien ("a hunter who knows how to hunt must know how to hunt without his dog"), which French Wikipedia calls one of the best known in France.

Italian: trentatré trentini

Trentatré trentini entrarono a Trento, tutti e trentatré trotterellando.

Thirty-three people from Trento came into Trento, all thirty-three of them trotting.

The hard sound: the tr cluster again, with Italian's rolled r, and the double t of tutti and trentatré, which Italian holds longer than a single one.

Portuguese: o rato roeu a roupa

O rato roeu a roupa do Rei de Roma e a rainha com raiva resolveu remendar.

The rat gnawed the King of Rome's clothes, and the queen, angry, decided to mend them.

The hard sound: the Portuguese r at the start of a word, which in Brazil is a breathy sound like English h and in Portugal a rasp in the throat, repeated in almost every word.

Esperanto: Ŝi ŝerce ŝanĝis

Ŝi ŝerce ŝanĝis la ŝarĝaĵon.

She jokingly changed the cargo.

The hard sound: Esperanto's ŝ ("sh") and ĝ (the j of "jam"), both written with a circumflex, packed into one short sentence. Esperanto Wikipedia collects a page of these; another is Ĉu Saŝa serĉas saĝan ŝercon? ("Is Sasha looking for a clever joke?"). Every letter in Esperanto always makes the same sound, which is why its twisters are built to test exactly those letters: see is Esperanto hard to learn.

Mandarin: 四是四

四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十。

Sì shì sì, shí shì shí, shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí.

Four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty.

The hard sounds: two at once. S (四 sì, four) against sh (是 shì, is; 十 shí, ten), and the tones: sì and shì are both falling, shí is rising. Get the consonant or the tone wrong and four becomes ten. The full version on Chinese Wikipedia adds a penalty: whoever says fourteen wrongly gets hit fourteen times. How the tones work is in Mandarin tones.

Shanghainese: what happens to 四是四

We could not find a Shanghainese tongue twister recorded by any source we would trust, so we will not invent one. But reading the Mandarin twister in Shanghainese shows how differently the two languages sound.

With the readings Verbavia's Shanghainese course uses, 四是四，十是十 becomes sy zy sy, zeh zy zeh. Mandarin's two traps are gone: there is no s against sh, and the tones work differently. A new contrast appears instead. Shanghainese has voiced consonants that Mandarin lacks, so 是 and 十 start with a buzzing z, while 四 has a plain s, and 十 ends in the short, clipped syllable written -eh. The line is still a tongue twister, but for a different reason. The sounds are set out in the Shanghainese pronunciation guide.

Te reo Māori: kupu whīwhiwhi

Tongue twisters in Māori are kupu whīwhiwhi. New Zealand's Ministry of Education published a set for Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, Māori Language Week, as pronunciation practice for classrooms. Each one drills one sound:

The Ministry's sheets give them as sound practice and do not translate them, so neither do we. The point is the sound: ng at the start of a word, which English never has, is the one that needs most practice, and the Māori pronunciation guide explains it.

Why tongue twisters work

A tongue twister takes two sounds that a language keeps apart, puts them side by side, and asks you to switch between them faster than you can plan each one. That is why each language's twisters show its own difficult contrasts: s and sh in French and Mandarin, tr in Spanish and Italian, ng in Māori.

For a learner they are a quick diagnostic. If a twister in your new language trips you on one particular sound, that sound is probably the one your accent needs most work on. The everyday words built on those sounds, which you will say far more often than any twister, are ranked in the hardest words to pronounce.

Verbavia (our own course) has a recording of every word in its courses, so you can hear the sounds before you try them: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Esperanto, Shanghainese and te reo Māori, free on the web.

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