Polish vs English tongue twisters

Hello everyone do you have in english so called tongue twisters? Which one are more difficult? ;>

Round no.1

She sells sea shells by the sea shore.
The shells she sells sure are sea shore shells,
For if she sells sea shore shells as sea shells,
The shells she sells are sea shore shells.

vs

Suchą szosą Sasza szedł.
W czasie suszy szosa sucha.

We have a lil'bit shorter those twisters but still they are pretty much twsiting ;P

Interesting Polish tongue twister.

The search thingy has become difficult to navigate back to the 'Latest discussion'

well I did search and found nothing!

only one result and its mine thread. Dont blame me!

there is a Polish one about a beetle making a sound in the grass....?

unavailable :)

Here's another with all 32 letters, only once:
Pchnąć w tę łódź jeża lub ośm skrzyń fig.

And more:

Archaminiwiniłokotoczerempapińczewińczekowska
Cesarz często czesał cesarzową.
Chłop pcha pchłę, pchłę pcha chłop.

en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Polish_tongue_twisters

If you think "W Szczebryznie chrzasc brzmi......" is tough for non-Poles, just you folks try "Theopholis Thistle, the successful thistle sifter, sifting a thread of unsifted thistles through the thick of his thumb...." or "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" five times fast and you'd all agree that English has about the "craziest" tongue twisters around!

LOL

Talking about Polish tongue twisters, I forgot to mention that English ones pose absolutely no problem to me. Your first one contains [θ] and [ð] sounds which are easy for me to pronounce. The other one of yours is a piece of cake. Aren`t there more difficult ones, really? :))

That`s my private opinion, others might have a problem though.

I didn't know this one! Nice :) All the /ʃ/ and [θ] sounds combined with [s] make it very difficult to pronounce.


In "Suchą szosą (...)" you only have [s] and [ʃ] combinations that are problematic. In Milo's twister there is also [θ] (which doesn't have a Polish equivalent) - for a Polish speaker it's definitely more difficult.

I posed this question in another thread and foreign members who read it were instantly struck by and flabbergasted with the last word zanieczyszczeń which means pollution.

Here is a rough phonetic transcript (US style coz they don`t grasp the British one).
[zanyetshishtshen]
Of course, if you tried to pronounce it accordingly, you wouldn`t avoid displaying heavy accent. Polish sounds are unique - only really brilliant foreign learners are able to master them like natives.
Hey, Poles and Polesses, utter this word out while trying to disengage from your native Polishness and hear this whistling/ swishing effect as if a traditional kettle was boiling. :):):)

🙉, It's easier to say "brudów".

yes, but washing your dirty linen in public suits another thread as an idiom.

Try these:

Six sick hicks nick six slick bricks with picks and sticks

A skunk sat on a stump and thunk the stump stunk, but the stump thunk the skunk stunk

Red lorry, yellow lorry.

I only understand "Trump" 😀

Those twisters with swishing sounds are a piece of cake for obvious reasons. The last one with r and .l is a challenge.

One of them has 'th' in, many Poles struggle to pronounce this letter combination.

I mastered the pronunciation of it at the age of 19 and have had no problems since then. Why? It is a swishing sound after all. :):):)

Not everyone can. I have never forgotten my Polish friend telling me that her daughter came in turd place for a race in her school sports day.........

My problem when I first started learning Polish was rolling the letter 'r'. That sound doesn't exist in English language just as 'th' doesn't in Polish. Took me a long time to learn how to do it. Found it easier to roll the 'r' if it was in the middle of a word rather than at the start. 'Kurwa' often became part of my vocabulary ;)

Most Polish learners aka my students tend to replace voiced th as v for example vhere instead of there and voiceless th as f e.g., free instead of three. So, they had free bikes on offer in the Red Market Square in Moscow while in fact it was 3 only.


It does. When used by Scots. :):)

Haha. I've never heard that substitution from Poles but then most of the Poles I know didn't learn English until they came to the UK or they'd had a crash course prior to coming here.

That substitution is sometimes used by English people, due to laziness I think.


This is true. Forgot about that.

Ooops. I wonder what their education credentials are if they are young or middle aged.
Only if they are elderly can they be excused from not knowing English. :):):)

That's ridiculous.

None of my Polish friends are elderly. Most are in their mid forties and learned Russian or German at school. In the early to mid nineties, English language wasn't widely taught, at least outside big cities. The children of my friends were taught English in Poland which helped when they came to the UK.

Most people I know don't speak English. A few speak a little, though not to me


Even then, outcomes in school language acquisition are not always what you'd hope for.

I'm not surprised. I think Pawian overestimates how widely English is spoken in Poland. And how well it's spoken. Those under 25 will know some but when I go to Poland I inevitably end up speaking Polish as even talking to younger Poles in English often results in blank stares.


Exactly.

That's his rules-and-tests based orientation. Lots of people in Poland (and other places) might do well in English classes in high school or university or might pass some standardized tests... but end up having no practical reason to use it in their daily lives and it atrophies.

I once had (sbuject based) classes where most of the students were English teachers and they freaked out in the beginning because their active knowledge had contracted to what they taught in school... it got a lot better after a couple of meetings as the knowledge wasn't gone, just dormant and needed to be wakened.

Years ago I had a German colleague and although I used to know a good bit of German (can still read a lot) and he'd had the usual many years of English classes, neither of us had used those languages much in recent years and we ended up just using Polish to communicate.

That might be part of it.
But also how people speak. I was communicating ok in here in writing but when I came to UK I had problems understanding people.

I have problems understanding a lot of UK speech and I have more knowledge of it than over 90% of US people (probably higher).

That's mostly due to the difference between textbooks and real life. Textbooks (which most Polish learners don't really go beyond) tend to have an artificial and old-fashioned language variety. That's not a dig, it's just the way it is (and probably has to be). But no one goes straight from textbooks to smooth communication with natives in any language.

Yep. If you don't use it you lose it. Many students once they've left school, unless they're working in the tourism sector maybe, or studying at University to teach English, might hardly ever encounter English speakers on a regular basis.

I spent a year working in France many moons ago and was fluent but now I would definitely struggle in conversation. Last time I was in France I picked up a newspaper and was happy to find I could still read French pretty well :)


That's interesting. Nice to think my French might be lying dormant somewhere.


Might be due to variations in dialect or the speed with which people speak. Not everyone speaks clearly and depending where some people are from, I have a job to understand them!

"Theophilis Thistle, the successful thistle sifter after sifting
a thread of unsifted thistles through the thick of his thumb.
Success to the successful thistle sifter!"

If that doesn't give Poles a run for their money, nothing will.LOL