Difficult Pronunciation Poem
The most difficult poem in the English language. Of course that is my opinion but this poem is Dr. Seuss on steroids. I saw this poem a few years back and I couldn’t believe it. Though there are several sites which have this poem this one had the pronunciation of it, which is immensely helpful. Below is a brief sample.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
When I taught English it was to young children who would be able to pick up the differences in much the way a native speaker would. In this poem by Gerard Noist Trenité, a Belgian, I have found the worst of the English language and really not how difficult it is to learn but how difficult it is to teach. I will never know how difficult it is to learn English as an adult but this poem’s last line states “My advice is give it up!” Which would be very, very tempting.
Pronunciation even varies dialectically making the proposition of pronouncing these "correctly" even more difficult. There is a broadly correct pronunciation but some of the words as pronounced by someone in Darwin, Australia would differ greatly from Aberdeenshire, Scotland. We do know how to read it but I'm not sure there is always a correct way of pronouncing things. As a living language that is something that continually changes.
~ Sarah
After reading your post I had to search this poem up and like you said it was difficult to read the first few stanzas. It took me a while to read it but I liked it. I'm going to share this poem with my brothers to see what they think of it.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Sarah! The poem has all the Spite of learning the English language (And perhaps teaching it too!) It was fun to read through this poem, and see how my brain naturally wanted to "rhyme" words, even though I should know better (yeah- right!)
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the reasons I like learning German. The way their phonetics match their spellings are so much simpler than most languages in my opinion. It's sort of "what you see is what you get" in most instances. Even when they borrow words from other languages, they alter the spelling or the phonetics to adhere to their language rules.
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