Despite having spoken French all my life, I have trouble with the word “arbre” (tree). It’s the rbr combo that kills me. It just stays stuck in my throat and I end up gargling the damn word! So I try to use the specific tree name instead, whenever I can.
Yeah, and I don’t talk about Sherbrooke street much, either.
I have trouble with linoleum (naloleum), and tabernacle (tablnacker). I only need tabernacle when I am talking about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and for the other I just say floor covering.
During a college political science class, I was reading a passage from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan aloud. I was doing perfectly well until I came to the word “ceaseth”, which I stumbled over repeatedly until the professor told me to just say “ceases” and move on. Fortunately, the word “ceaseth” is archaic, and I haven’t had cause to say it since that day a quarter-century ago.
I have trouble with phrases that contain a rapid succession of several r and w sounds, which means I try to find alternatives to “one-run win” if talking baseball, or “white right-winger” when discussing politics.
Not a phrase I have to say often, but the /l/ and /r/ close together trip me up.
Me too. Comes out like /mallboro/. Damn those letters in proximity to one another!
For a scene in an acting class, I had a line that read “The soldiers’ll come!” I could not wrap my tongue around the middle word to save my life unless I went really super slow.
Sixths. The most unpronounceable consonant cluster in the English language. The word that forced me to give up a promising career as an elementary math teacher.
You think English is bad, try Georgian or Tibetan.
I think I need to add your screenname to my list of tongue twisters
I’m a bit surprised no one’s mentioned “specific”, I thought that was a fairly common one. Knew a girl a while back who used to fumble it so badly and often that she found it easier to say “pacific” and just explain herself afterward when someone asked.
Yep. Nine-letter word, one vowel, the vowel at the end… I was amazed when my friend told me about it. I suspect that at least the R and the first V are vocalic, no?