The El Que Poco Coco Come Tongue Twister
El que poco coco come, poco coco compra.
Como poco coco como, poco coco compro.
Why Is It So Hard?
“Coco” (coconut) and “como” (I eat / as) share the /ko/ syllable but differ in the second consonant: /koko/ vs /komo/. At speed, the brain predicts /ko/ for every word and stops tracking whether the middle consonant is /k/ or /m/, producing “coco coco compra” instead of “coco como compra.” The second sentence shifts from third person (come/compra) to first person (como/compro), changing both the vowel and the person marker simultaneously. This double shift under speed is where most speakers lose the sentence entirely.
History
“El Que Poco Coco Come” is a classic Spanish trabalenguas built around the near-identical phonological shape of “coco” (coconut) and “como” (a form of comer, to eat). The logic is a genuine statement: whoever eats little coconut buys little coconut; I eat little coconut, so I buy little coconut. That internal logic makes the sentence easy to learn but hard to say because the near-homophones sit next to each other throughout. No original author is credited. It is widely used in primary school Spanish classes across Latin America as an introduction to the rr/r distinction via the letter c.
Tips for Saying It
- Isolate “coco / como / compra” and say each five times to feel the middle consonant difference: /k/, /m/, /mpr/.
- Practise the second sentence alone ten times, the person shift makes it independently harder than the first.
- Clap on every “coco” to count the repetitions and track your position in the sentence.
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