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….
- Lawyer and Liar
- Sheet and Shit
- 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 🙂