How to twist your tongue in a greek way….
When I was a kid , as my native language was Russian, I always had a great difficulty to learn Greek. On the other hand my father , who was born and raised in Greece tried always to tease me. He wanted me to say phrases that I realised later that they were tongue twisters. One of them goes like that
Μια πάπια μα ποιά πάπια ; Μια πάπια με παπιά
A duck but which duck? A duck with ducklings.
Usually I could not say the whole phrase. I twisted my tongue and get myself embarrassed. And after all who cares which duck is the one with the ducklings ? Will I ever use this phrase in my life ? I doubt it… But I took the challenge after that and I can say that today I spell all the Greek twisters correctly…
My dear reader, please listen to the next one. This is pure poetry….
Ο παππάς ο παχύς έφαγε παχιά φακή. Γιατί παππά παχύ έφαγες παχιά φακή;
The fat priest ate fat lentil soup. Why, fat priest, did you eat fat lentil soup?
Creator: Lemour12 - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
How can a lentil soup be fat anyway? There are tiny and big (fat) lentils , but this soup , unless you are a hell of a cook is usually tasteless , even if you have used a lot of olive oil to cook it. Maybe priests should not eat fat soups anyway….
In this website , which I mentioned on a previous post, one can find 41 Greek tongue twisters. I tried to create audio files …at least for some of them. So, you can find only 5 for the moment on my Skydrive account. Just be careful, if you are not original Greek , not to try these twisters without the presence of a doctor …(I am kidding of course)….
Please write down in the comments about your favourites tongue twisters in your language…(please add a translation if possible).
Hi Glavko
Here are a few I’ve learned over the years in other languages:
German:
Fischer’s Fritz fischt frische Fische. (Fritz, presumably a cat, belonging to a man named Fischer or a fisherman, fishes for fresh fish.)
Der Potzdamer Postkutscher putzten den Potzdamer Postkutschenkasten. (The postal coachman from Potsdam was cleaning the post box from Potsdam.)
Spanish:
Tres tristes tigres tragaban trigo en un tragal. (Three sad tigers were carrying grain in a wheelbarrow.)
Rapidos corren los carros por la linea del ferrocarril. (The cars on the railroad line go fast.) (This one is not really a tongue twister – it’s for practicing the long rolled “rr” sound.)
Turkish:
Yoğurdu sarımlasak mı sarımsaklamasak mı? (Shall we put garlic in the yoghurt or not?)
That’s all I can think of off the top of my head, but that’s probably enough for now anyhow.
Laura 3:)
Hmm – I can’t find a button to edit this, but I made a mistake on the Turkish one – I missed a syllable! It should read like this:
Yoğurdu sarımsaklasak mı sarımsaklamasak mı?
@Laura3:) Of course you should put a lot of garlic in the yoghurt if you want to prepare good tzatziki ::4)))
Thank you very much Laura for your precious comments ..I really enjoyed all of them.