Can you say "toy boat" quickly three times? I can't, so I included it in my list of tongue twisters my students could pick from for my Tongue Twister class. Well, one after the other said it flawlessly to my absolute shock. They had a great time watching me fail miserably at trying it. If that wasn't interesting enough, I shared this with friends at my English Free Zone and one boy (born and raised in Japan) could of course say it with no trouble. However, the boy who was born in Brazil (to Japanese parents) had the same trouble I did even though his Japanese is so good his friends didn't believe him when he said he was from Brazil. If I was getting my PhD I think I would pick this as my research topic. What makes a tongue twister hard? It's fascinating to think about. This shows that it can't simply be a matter of whether or not your tongue can get into that position or not. It appears that the lack of tongue flexibility helps the Japanese with that one. Fascinating.
Comments
Fascinating, indeed! I would never have guessed.
Posted by
SursumCorda
on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 8:48 pm
Very interesting! Here's a possible (partial) explanation... In English "oy" is a diphthong (a vowel with 2 sounds), while Japanese does not have that phoneme, so it will be transliterated as two syllables. Even for English speakers, "toy boat" is easier to say repeatedly if one imagines that each word has 2 syllables.
Posted by
Peter V
on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Peter - amazing! All I had to do was make Toy a two syllable word and I could do it!! Now I have something I can really razz my nephew with. (Assuming he doesn't read this blog.)
Posted by
Dad-o
on Sunday, May 21, 2006 at 1:47 pm
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