Month: January 2012

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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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Movie Review: Mission Impossible IV – No Spoilers :)

So, I do like action movies, and I do like the Uptown Theatre in Cleveland Park, so this Holiday weekend I was to check out Mission Impossible 4.

Tom Cruise and Paramount?

Maybe I read the tabloids, but I thought that when Tom Cruise declared his belief in Scientology, that Paramount dropped him from all movie contracts, but several years later, back they are working together.

Technology!

While I do work in DC, I don’t work for a defense contractor, so maybe for you guys the technology is already used in the military today, but for me, real or not, it was really cool!  While more complicated than one would think, the projection screen with a camera behind it to camouflage them as they moved closer to the guard station was really nice.  Also, Apple must have shelled out a few advertizing bucks as the iPad was used quite often and they all had iPhones.

The briefcase with document printer was also really cool.  Paired with a camera contact lens, pretty cool.

Probably the cheesiest technical item were the seemingly static cling gloves.  While it did not seem that possible, the sound they made when “energizing” was truly annoying.  It was really funny when they broke after just a short time, I guess that was the realistic part 🙂

The Best MI Movie?

I do need to watch the first 3 over again, but I do have to agree that the movie was action packed and had the actors tossed in a fair share of comical statements along the way.  I am not sure if I will spend the money on Blu-Ray when it comes out, but it certainly will be a movie I will rent for a $1 to see again.

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