English is not that easy after all

[Keswick (Contributor)]

I thought you might find this interesting .

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through.
Well don't! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard but sounds like bird.
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead,
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth as in mother
Nor both as in bother, nor broth as in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear, for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose
And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword
And do and go, then thwart and cart,
Come, come! I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful Language? Why man alive!
I learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.

Source: http://international.ouc.bc.ca/pronunci ... oem01.html

[caro64]

Great! And if you read it and it rhymes, then you know you've read it right. This does actually make me think...Who on earth created this language? Were they hi, drunk or what? Cheers, Caro

[Keswick (Contributor)]

I think they were very creative .. or they wanted to make it impossible for foreigners to master their language *g* .

[Sleepy]

That's really cool!

I think, I pronounced 95% of the words correctly

[joy]

Hi Keswick

It's really great, although I couldn't make out yet what it says. I'll try to tranlate it later. I wanted to open the site to also hear it, yet unfortunately, the internet crashed. Did this happen only to me?

Nevertheless, thanks a lot for this crazy text!
joy

[Joefish]

damn....
Keswick, that's one of the most awesome crackjaw I've ever read.
okay... not really crackjaw but hard to pronounce for somebody who born and raised in Germany
Even if you've got the nationality of a country where you normally speak english it's kinda hard as I said above
I really envy you after living in GB for quite some time and if you can read that text without any problems => congrats ^^
I had some probs where I was really confused.
But after think about my misspellling but could beat the :censored: out of me..
But after all hey.. that's what this text is for, isn' it

(btw after all this inverted commas I'm kinda exhausted )

[Krami85]

Oh man that's a really tough twister.
But I like it, it shows that german is not the only difficult leraning language.

[Krami85]

Oh man that's a really tough twister.
But I like it, it shows that german is not the only difficult leraning language.

Sorry I mean "tongue" twister