How Tongue Twisters Work
Japanese Tongue Twisters in an American Podcast?! Cool! I was listening through my daily dose of podcasts, which I tend to do during my daily perusal of RSS subscriptions, when I heard this one queue up in the playlist. The topic of discussion was something familiar to readers of this blog. Take a listen to this clip I’ve isolated from the show, and see the credits underneath the clip, please. 
Without further ado…
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This was lifted from HowStuffWorks.com’s majorly popular free podcast, Stuff You Should Know
, released on February 6, 2009. Check it out! Also, check out the accompanying article.
Just for the record, the two tongue twisters attempted in Japanese during this audio excerpt are as follows. (I translated the tongue twister differently in my oooold post. I still think I’m right. I’ll verify and go back through that document for republishing. It’s years behind my current Japanese level, and kind of embarrasses me.) I recorded myself attempting these – feel free to giggle.
カエルぴょこぴょこ三ぴょこぴょこ合わせてぴょこぴょこ六ぴょこぴょこ。
Kaeru pyoko pyoko mi-pyoko pyoko awasete pyoko pyoko mu-pyoko pyoko.
A frog bobs along; 3 hops plus 3 hops makes 6 hops.*
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この釘は引く抜き難い釘だ。
Kono kugi wa hiki-nuki-nikui kugi da.
This nail is (one that’s) hard to pull out.
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* – the fellow in the podcast says “croaks,” but I think he’s mistaken…can anyone confirm or deny in the comments section, please? There have got to be some Japanese masters out there.
If you’re a fan of tongue twisters and verbs like “pull out,” then you should give this one a go, too: 引き抜き難い挽き肉は引き抜き難い温い肉だ。It’s gross, sure, but it’s kind of like the more difficult older brother of the nail tongue twister tried in the clip. For folks who can’t read Japanese just yet, here’s the romanized phonetic guide: hiki-nuki-nikui hikiniku wa hiki-nuki-nikui nukui niku da. That’s right, it means, “Minced meat that is hard to pull out is hard to pull out warm meat.” Eeew. Ok, ok, here’s me trying this one too. 
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And yes, I will be emailing the podcast guys about this!
