Tuesday, September 22, 2009

English lessons:

Sometimes students complain about the complexities of Spanish pronunciation. Personally, I think that it is pretty straightforward. To compare, let me give an example from English. Maybe the few hipanohablantes that read this blog can comment on this.

"OUGH"--Five words, five different pronunciations:

Cough (like off)
Tough (like buff)
Though (like toe)
Through (like dew)
Bough (like pow)

Related lesson: "GH"

Ghost [g]
Ought -silent- (and for the record, the vowel sound here... same as "cough". I vote that we just scrap the alphabet, adopt the IPA, and then send all adults, myself included, back to kindergarten to learn it.)
Laugh [f]

Can we agree that Spanish is at least a little more straightforward than English?
at

4 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 23, 2009 at 7:29 AM

    Cough (like off)
    Where are you from? ha ha!

    ReplyDelete
  2. MaundererSeptember 23, 2009 at 9:26 AM

    Hahahaha... Sorry, I was just thinking of the vowel sounds - in which case 'hot' and 'off' are the same. It is true that some of the OUGH words have an F sound at the end while others don't but I was not thinking about anything but the vowels. Sorry if that threw you.
    But here is a question - between the words 'of' and 'off' what is it that changes? Is there a rule for that sort of change? I don't think that English would be so easy to learn as an adult.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousSeptember 24, 2009 at 7:26 AM

    This is getting even more interesting because I wasn't talking about the F sound. When I isolate the OU sound in COUGH it has the same sound as the O in OFF. But COUGH does not sound like the O in your HOT. The O in my HOT sounds more like the Spanish A. ha ha
    I do, however, agree that English pronunciation and spelling would be difficult to learn as an adult. And I know nothing of a rule for your OF/OFF question.

    ReplyDelete
  4. plain janeSeptember 26, 2009 at 12:16 PM

    Cough and off rhyme for me too ... but that's probably because we're related.

    I've heard that English is actually one of the more difficult languages to master--partly because there are no consistent rules.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)