Do you love trabalenguas? I do, but it never really occurred to me that tongue twisters are a great tool to reinforce my kids’ Spanish. I mean, I’ve recited a couple of my favorite here and there, but I hadn’t taken the time to formally introduce Vanessa to them til this weekend.

About four weeks ago, my family and I went to San Diego for my stepson’s graduation from the Marines. Although we were only there for a long weekend, we decided to take a trip south of the border into Tijuana. Besides having a great time with really good friends, we brought back home a lot of goodies, including tons of Mexican candy and, most importantly, several children’s books and other reading materials in Spanish — but we hadn’t had a chance to go through it all just yet.

Since we wanted to escape the frigid temperatures brought about by our first snow storm, we spent a lot of time indoors this weekend. At some point, Vanessa brought me of Muy Interesante Junior, one of the kid’s magazine we bought in Tijuana and together we started going through it. Nothing caught her attention much until we got to a page titled “El destrabalenguario” by journalist Eduardo Limón and as we started reading about tongue twisters and the story behind the three examples included in the article.

This was a great opportunity for me to talk to Vanessa about trabalenguas and to teach her some of my favorite ones. And she loved them all! Coincidentally, one of the children’s books we also got in that trip to Mexico was one titled Trabalenguas para todos by María Tellez (the one Vanessa’s holding in the photo you see here), but we hadn’t even opened it (in Latin America, books are sold wrapped in cellophane). Since Vanessa showed so much interest, I figured it’d be a great time to introduce her to even more trabalenguas and I was so happy to see she was totally hooked!

She walked around with the book most of Sunday afternoon, sharing some of the trabalenguas she discovered with whomever would listen and trying to recite the ones she had memorized as fast as possible. Since we had so much fun with them, I thought I’d share her favorite ones (so far) with you so maybe you can teach them to your bilingual kids and burst out laughing too!

From Muy Interesante Junior:

Si yo como como como y tú comes como comes

¿Cómo comes como como? Si yo como como como.

From Trabalenguas para todos:

Si Pancha plancha con cuatro planchas,

¿con cuántas planchas plancha Pancha?

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Cuando cuentes cuentos

cuenta cuántos cuentos cuentas

porque cuando cuentas cuentos

nunca cuentas cuántos cuentos cuentas.

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Ñoño Yáñez come ñame

en las mañanas con el niño.

Besides being super fun and challenging for anyone regardless of their fluency in Spanish, trabalenguas are a great way to practice pronunciation. Next time, I’ll share some of the ones I’ll be adding to the repertoire of exercises I’ve been using to help Vanessa in one of her problem areas: rolling her R’s.

Do you have a favorite trabalenguas you’d like to share with us?

Vanessa has always had a hard time pronouncing the letter R. Lately, though, she’s become keenly aware that she can’t roll her Rs. Out of the blue, she’ll repeat words like perro and carro and rápido and ask me if she’s saying them right. Unfortunately, she’s not. But I’m not freaking out just yet because I’ve read this is normal since Spanish speaking children typically don’t learn to roll their R’s until they’re between 5 and 7 years old. This means Vanessa still has a little over a year!

In all seriousness though, she’s not happy that she can’t do it and so I’ve been wanting to help her practice how to roll her R’s the last few days. Yesterday, I decided to do some research and now I have a few exercises to use with her that I want to share with you.

For starters, here’s the advice one of our very own experta, Ellen Stubbe Kester, Ph.D, CCS-LLP, a bilingual speech language professional, told one of our readers about three years ago regarding her daughter’s trouble rolling her R’s:

The trilled R is a D sound with the tip of the tongue moving. Try these drills:

The syllable level:

DRA DRE DRI DRO DRU

TRA TRE TRI TRO TRU

The word level:

PARDO, TARDE, CUERDA, GORDO

I also found these rhymes and tongue twisters recommended for learning how to roll Rs. Check them out:

RHYMES

• El cielo está enladrillado
  El cielo está enladrillado,
  quién lo desenladrillará.
  El desenladrillador que lo desenladrille,
  buen desenladrillador será.

• El otro día me caí
  del ferrocarril
  al lado de un barril.
  El barril tenia ruedas
  ¡Qué raro barril!
  Y con las ruedas
  caí en el barro marrón!
  Fui a mi casa, me bañé rápido
  y dije todo otra vez

• Erre con erre, guitarra,
  erre con erre, barril.
  ¡Mira que rápido ruedan
  las ruedas redondas
  del ferrocarril!

TRABALENGUAS (or Tongue Twisters)

• Borracho un ratón robó
  un ramo de rosas rojas.
  El rabo se le enredó
  y rodó de rosa en rosa.

 
• El ratón se come un bombón.
  Se viene un gato marrón a comer el ratón.
  Pero el bombón reventó, ¡BOM!

 
So I’m going to go ahead and practice these with Vanessa. We’ll see how it goes. Promise to keep you posted.

Got any rhymes or tongue twisters of your own? Please share!