DaveBee wrote:Perhaps because it forces you to pronounce words correctly?neofight78 wrote:They're difficult for native speakers, i.e. I'm crap with English tongue twisters, so why do non-native speakers have to wrestle with them? The few occasions a Russian teacher has used them, I've not really felt any benefit. Maybe someone has a difference experience or even has some data on this.
TV5's learn french pages include tongue twisters (les virelangues) in their material too, so there must be an argument for them somewhere.
No data, but I think for me, it's useful practice. Like you, I'm no good at them in English and I have no desire to be able to rattle them off like mad. But when I work on them, it makes me practise some of the sounds that I probably fudge a bit - for example, today I had to really practise bits where it goes from т to ть at the end of words, which I definitely don't always do when speaking. And I do notice that when I've been doing tongue twisters, speaking normally did come a bit more naturally.
Not really relevant to this group, but when I was teaching, I used to make the kids practise tongue twisters. It made us all laugh, they liked the challenge of it (and would then go away repeating the tongue twisters, which I definitely couldn't get them to do with the vocab they were meant to be learning!). And it was a good way of working on sounds like 'th' or 'w', without just drilling endlessly.