Introducing The World's Most Unpronouncable Sentence

This is one for the hardcore Word Nerds :-)

It's my first night in Warszawa, and I'm spending the last part of it in a little wine bar on a very stately avenue called Marszalkowska.

I've been to Poland's capital twice before, but both times I was just passing through and had no time to look around. Now I've got around 10 days to acquaint myself with the city.

It's gonna be GREAT!

I don't quite know how the conversation got started, but I've been chatting on and off with a friendly waitress here, and the subject of the Polish language has come up.

Polish is one of the most beautiful languages I've ever heard (though you wouldn't guess it from the written form, which looks like an enormous flock of 'z's has crashed recklessly into another language and knocked all the vowels out of formation). However, it's also one of the most difficult to pronounce. 

We started talking about difficult words, and the waitress has just handed me a Polish tongue-twister which she wrote on a little slip of paper.

Here it is:

w Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.

It means sth like "In small villages, crickets chirrup in the long grass". And if it looks completely and utterly unpronouncable to you, you're not far wrong. I've been trying for several minutes, and I'm still a couple of hundred attempts away from getting it.

Indeed, I've just been told that this sentence is extremely difficult even for Polish people to say, and that if a foreigner can crack it, that will be "Something really unbelievable!"

Obviously, at this point, I have no choice but to try.

You can try too if you like. Just bear in mind these one or two simple rules:

- w sounds like English 'v'
- sz sounds like English 'sh', but with a little bit more 'voice'
- cz sounds like English 'ch' (as in "cheese")
- rz after another constant sounds like the 's' in pleasure
- y sounds like being hit in the chest, but not too hard
  (kind of a gentle 'ugh!' sound)
- ie sounds like "Yeah!"

That's the first two words dealt with! Easy, isn't it?

A lot of these sounds crop up later too (e.g. in chrząszcz you've got another sz and another cz), so you can re-use the same rules.

But chrząszcz also has a few extra sounds you need to know. They are:

ch     This sounds like it does at the end of Gaelic words (think 'Loch')

ą       A tricky beast, this one, as the devilish tail suggests. 
         If the consonant after it is voiced, it sounds like 'arm' (in a UK accent).
         If the next consonant has no voicing, you say 'arn' instead. 
         In this word, you need to say 'chrzamszcz' (the sound of the insects).

Then to do brzmi, just remember your rz rule, and when you come to the last word, watch out for the c on its own. That sounds like 'ts' - the sound of a hi-hat cymbal on a drum kit.

Ok ... got that? If so, you're ready to crack the Polish tongue-twister. Good luck, and let me know how you go :-)

Meanwhile, I'll be sure to report back on every little thing that happens in Warszawa.

See you!