[Recreation] Challenge! A roundup of tongue twisters recommended for elementary school students
Let’s all have fun and exercise our mouths!
We’ve put together some tongue twisters we definitely want elementary schoolers to try.
When you read them, you might think, “These aren’t hard at all,” but when you actually say them, you end up stumbling… Tongue twisters are such a curious kind of game!
You can compete with friends to see who can say them properly, or challenge yourself with harder ones to test your limits—there are lots of ways to play!
Even if you can’t say them smoothly at first, if you keep at it, your articulation might get better and better!
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[Rec] Challenge! A collection of tongue twisters recommended for elementary school students (11–20)
The customer next door is a customer who often eats persimmons.
Everyone must have tried it at least once! “Tonari no kyaku wa yoku kaki kuu kyaku da” is a tongue twister that uses lots of K sounds.
The trick to saying it well is to clearly distinguish between ka and kya.
When you try to say it fast, kaki can turn into kyaki, and kyaku can turn into kaku.
In those cases, start slowly and practice while opening your mouth wide.
That way, your mouth movements will create distinct pronunciations, and you’ll make fewer mistakes!
Red seared short ribs, Blue seared short ribs, Yellow seared short ribs
This adds the classic tongue-twister pattern of putting a color in front to “aburi karubi,” a phrase that’s already hard to say on its own, making it even more difficult.
Imagining red, blue, and yellow aburi karubi lined up somehow doesn’t seem appetizing, which adds to the humor.
The tricky part of aburi karubi is the sequence of the Japanese r-sounds and voiced consonants, so be mindful of your mouth shape as you practice.
With the addition of colors, vowels like “a” and “o,” as well as the K-row sounds, also come into play, making it even more important to pay attention to mouth positioning.
Parent turtle, child turtle, grandchild turtle
It’s a tongue twister that simply refers to three generations of turtles—parent, child, and grandchild—and since each word is short, it seems easy to say.
There’s no complex scene description, but because it mentions three generations, you can sense the age differences and picture turtles of different sizes lined up.
As a tongue twister, the final “grandchild turtle” is the key point—the sequence of voiced consonants where “grandchild” connects to “turtle” makes it hard to pronounce.
It may help to shape your mouth clearly for the vowels and put some force into the voiced sounds.
Red capybara, blue capybara, yellow capybara
This is a classic tongue-twister pattern: take a word that’s already hard to say and make it even trickier by adding color words.
Here, the focus is on “capybara,” and the addition of words like “red,” “blue,” and “yellow” highlights how awkward it becomes to pronounce.
The tricky point is the connection between the “pi” and “ba” sounds in “capybara.” Because those popping consonants mix with softer vowel sounds like “a” and “o,” be mindful of switching between them.
Since a colorful capybara doesn’t exist in reality, it might be fun to imagine the scenario on purpose while you practice the pronunciation.
kitty, kitten, grandkitten
It’s a classic tongue twister pattern where you add the characters for “child” and “grandchild” to a word, making it harder to say through their linkage.
Here, we focus on the word “nyanko”! The way this word is pronounced—moving the mouth firmly—creates the difficulty.
The key seems to be how smoothly you can switch between “ko,” pronounced with a quick flick at the back of the mouth, and “nya,” pronounced softly while opening the mouth.
But if you focus too much on that, you’ll get tripped up by the “mago” that comes in between—another tricky point.
I gotta buy some KitKats.
There’s a tongue twister that plays on the KitKat product name: “Kit Kat kattokan to ikankatta noni, anta ga kattokan katta node, ikankatta kanda wa.” It’s pretty confusing, isn’t it? In simple terms, it means something like, “We were supposed to buy a Kit Kat, but you didn’t buy it in advance, so that was no good.” The phrases “katto” and “katta” keep appearing, so pay attention to those and give it a try.
[Rec] Challenge! A compilation of tongue twisters recommended for elementary school students (21–30)
a very sick snow crabKenta Otani
It’s a tongue twister that describes a snow crab crouching and looking unwell, making you hesitate over whether to be concerned.
The prop card shows it squatting in a bathroom, but the fact that it’s hard to picture the situation from words alone is part of the fun.
The tricky part is the similar-sounding words—sugoi (amazing), guai (condition), warui (bad), and zuwai (snow crab)—which test your ability to articulate with big mouth movements.
Since mouth shape matters, it might even be good to exaggerate it on purpose.