Last Saturday, a couple of boys who came to the Dar Chebab (the youth center where I do most of my volunteering) asked me to teach them about speaking in English. I decided to continue an English class I had started with them earlier in the week in which I was showing them different vowel sounds, and the different ways in which the same vowel sound is spelled, as shown by different words.
I was telling them that the long "a" sound is found in words spelled like "late," "bait," "pay," "paid," and "stayed," among others. At that point, Stan, the other PCV living in my town, chuckled, and said something like, "English is crazy! All of these words are pronounced with the same vowel sound, but they're not spelled the same way!"
Later, I told them about words with the short "a" sound like "at," "cat," "and," "hand," and others. We also covered words with the long "e" sound, the short "e" sound, the long "i" sound, the short "i" sound, the long "o" sound, the short "o" sound, the long "u" sound, and the short "u" sound.
I think that they started to have difficulty processing the intricacies when I started getting into less usual cases. One of them seemed to be taking a little time to process the pronunciation of the last syllable of the word "illiterate." But the last straw seemed to be the word "dove." I had previously told them that the words "love" and "above" were pronounced with a short "u" sound. Then I told them that the word "dove," when referring to the bird of this name, is pronounced in a way which rhymes with "love" and "above." But then I added that when it's referring to the past tense of the word "dive," that it's pronounced with a long "o" sound. At that point, it looked like I was driving them crazy, so I figured that we had reached a good time to end the lesson!
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