Texas city names are notoriously hard to pronounce. From medium-level difficulty towns like “Boerne” to expert-level areas like “Nacogdoches,” it’s easy to doubt your ability to understand English.

KCEN anchor Adrian Carbajal recently moved to the Waco area, and figured this out the hard way in a social media stunt this month. His colleague, Baylee Bates, had him attempt to sound out local destinations in a video on Friday, October 3.

Carbajal, who is originally from Los Angeles, California, said he was “100 percent” sure he’d sound them out correctly. However, he folded at his first test, which was Buda, a city about 60 miles north of San Antonio.

Pronounced “Byoo-duh,” like “beautiful,” he opted for the safe route, guessing it was “Buh-duh.” After seeing the looks on his coworkers’ faces, he took a few more stabs at it before getting it right around the third try. His next challenge was Llano, which is Northwest of Austin. 

“I feel like I should know this one,” Carbajal said. “Lay-no? Lah-no? Yah-no?”

Looking around for help, a staff member encouraged him to “forget every bit of Spanish” he ever learned to nail it. Finally, Bates revealed the answer as “Lahn-o.”

“I just went out there,” he said, shocked.

Carbajal’s final trial was not butchering the name Gruene, a cozy neighborhood based in New Braunfels. Nervous, he asked, “Grehn-ee?” then, “Gru-ehn?” 

When it was revealed to be “Green,” he was dumbfounded.

“That’s not ‘Green’!” he exclaimed.

“The struggle is real,” Bates captioned the TikTok post. “Would you pass the Texas city name test?”

The video gathered roughly 388,000 views and over 500 comments, with several residents saying they, too, get some of these titles wrong. Others begged for a part two, pleading with Bates to see if he can get right places like “Schertz” and “Waxahachie,” the latter of which is perhaps among the most cruel.

“I have lived in Texas my whole life and still can’t pronounce some of them right,” San Antonio realtor Will Glover commented on the post.

Bates continued the series in a follow-up clip on Tuesday, October 7. It includes Bexar County, Boerne, and Manor.

“I feel like everything has a twist,” Carbajal said in the video. “[It’s like] ‘What is the dumbest way you can pronounce this word?’ And then that one’s it.”