French Lesson

While the couple shall remain anonymous, I had the privilege of helping some friends, a newly arrived couple from France with some English.

Dilemma

While I have heard that in some languages, accent and tone can complete change the meaning of a word, I did not realize that English was one of those, but here is an example to support this.

How do you pronounce the following….

  1. Lawyer and Liar
  2. Sheet and Shit
  3. Beach and Bitch

Firstly…. Lawyer and Liar and sometimes considered synonyms.  I am just kidding of course, but there are times when this is true.

Second…. Here is where we chucked a bit, but I was glad to help as it is certainly important to make sure these words are pronounced correctly.  The big lesson here is the vowel pronunciation.  They do have a very strong accent, so even while I explained the difference between “ee” = “eeeeeee” and ‘i’ = “ih,” the words still sound almost the same 🙂

Thirdly…. Basically the same dilemma as number 2.

Practice

I came up with the following sentence to help reinforce this lesson.

“Don’t take any sheets from the beach.”

Granted it is not the best, but I think you get the idea 🙂

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