Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Friday dudes!

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

I think it’s the part that’s missing from the “foreign language” lessons we’re given here in the UK (I mostly learned French from a series of Michel Thomas CDs after leaving). And it seems to be a mostly english-speaking problem: there’s an inate inability to understand that the same letters are pronounced differently in different languages.

We’d regularly be given books to read from, and pronounce everything in clipped English vowels, then patted on the head and told “very good” simply for having had a go at it. It was years after leaving school that I learned that the letter “i” in French, for example, is pronounced “ee”. Or that “e” is “uh” or “é” is “ay” etc. It’s no wonder my neighbours struggled to understand me when I first started visiting the area we eventually moved to! (the greatest compliment I received was being recognised as a “country yokel” when we went to visit Paris after living in the Loire for 12 months).

@limburger – are those the words being sung in that video? I can’t even begin to put the words I can hear to the words on the screen!