[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 (31–40)
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.
Water-stealing horned owlKenta Otani
This is a tongue twister depicting a bizarre situation where drinking water that should have been left there gets stolen by a horned owl.
The image of the owl leaving while clutching the water—and the impossibility of the scenario—adds to the humor.
As a tongue twister, the key is the repeated “mi” sound, which tests how smoothly you can produce a sound that starts with closed lips.
It’s important to find a mouth shape that makes “mi” easy to say, while also trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.
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.
Please buy me a KitKat.
There’s a famous Hakata dialect tongue twister: “Kittokatto kattotte tte ittotta to ni nande kattotte kuren katta to, tte iwareta kenga Kittokatto kattokan to ikan katta to ni katte kuttowa suretotta ken, mata kaigya ikanto ikan kenga mendokusaka.” It’s pretty long, so just reading it is tough.
In short, it’s saying: “They wanted me to have bought a KitKat in advance, but since I forgot to buy it, I have to go buy one now—what a hassle.”
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.