Shanghai Bob

We went to XinTianDi again this evening and ended up at the bar featured on the cover of the Lonely Planet Shanghai City Guide (TMSK), where we were privileged to pay $12 for a drink. We practiced saying 555,555,555.55 and 111,111,111.11 in Chinese (not easy), and tried the following tongue-twister:

shí sì shì shí sì
sì shí shì sì shí
shí sì bú shì sì shí
sì shí bú shì shí sì

(fourteen is fourteen
forty is forty
fourteen is not forty
forty is not fourteen)

For the record, the hardest tongue-twister I know in English is:

The Leith police dismisseth us.

The hardest tongue-twister I know, period, is one that Imme taught me:

Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid und Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut.

([A] Wedding dress remains [a] wedding dress and cabbage remains cabbage.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 12:23 pm and is filed under chinese, linguistics.