There are certain days where my life feels like this scene in My Fair Lady. Or more precisely, the part preceding it, which leads to Higgins slumped over his desk and Colonel Pickering with a newspaper over his head.
I find myself doing ridiculous things while teaching English pronunciation, like over exaggerated facial and mouth movements, or clanging and tapping along in a rhythm. My students giggle as I show them where to place their tongue when saying "really", or while trying to impress on them how exactly to pronounce comfortable naturally. (It turns into com-for-ta-ble, each syllable highly pronounced. And I think the Japanese r/l pronunciation already has an infamy all its own.)
But despite how tough I am on correcting pronunciation, the root of the problem is really English itself.
Today, I was teaching one of my private lessons. It's a 12 year old girl, and bless her, does she try hard. The material is quite difficult at times, and she clearly tries as much as she can to understand. And while she generally gets the concept, her pronunciation of the words is very poor. I am probably the first English teacher she's had who actually speaks English as their first language, so I am not entirely surprised by this.
But because of that fact, I do a bit of phonics and pronunciation practice with her every week. Supplemental stuff; I go through the bevy of phonics sheets my school has just lying around, and grab one to use each time we meet.
This week, I came upon one that, at first, seemed all right. A writing practice, with each corresponding letter of the alphabet paired with a word to go along with it. It started with apple and bat, and went on to monkey and rabbit. Everything seemed kosher, and then I hit the last page, where I came upon y. And what word did they give this poor girl?
Yacht.
I mean, come on. What about yellow or yard. Something that is phonetically possible for a child learning English to sound out? No, we go for yacht, which is derived from a 16th century Dutch word and is pronounced not at all the way it's spelled.
She glanced up at me with a terrified look when she came upon it. As if learning English one on one with me wasn't scary enough. So I sighed, took the newspaper off my head, and pronounced yacht for her.
Each day I spend here, I am more glad I was born an English speaker. Not only is it the modern lingua franca, but I see how hard people work to learn it. For many people, advancement in the world is entirely dependent on a language that breaks the rules as much as it adheres to them.
But that's because English is a mongrel language, with roots and words derived from numerous different sources. As English speakers were conquered, and then subsequently went on to conquer, the language became a hodge-podge of dialects, vocabulary, and syntax.
Which is actual fantastic and amazing, but a bitch to learn. I give massive credit to my students who work so hard at learning my language, and especially for the few who truly succeed at it.
And their hard work, as well as extremely insightful questions, has actually spawned a pet project of mine. The last month I have been researching not only the history of the English language, but where each and every inconsistency in grammar or pronunciation comes from. It is half done out of pure intellectual curiosity, and half out of necessity, because there have been times I have no good answer for perfectly logical questions about my mother tongue.
(My research has been compiled into an ever increasing in length document that may make its appearance here soon. Avoid it if you are not as excited by linguistics as I am).
But I never would have given English a second thought if it weren't for the fantastically perceptive questions made by people still learning it. Things we have come to accept as part of the tapestry of language, but in fact makes little sense in the context of the language as a whole.
And pronunciation is just one of those things. And while it is interesting to study, I feel for the people trying to learn it. The adults who come across chalet with a quirk of confusion, or the little girl terrified of yacht.
So I continue to do my silly mouth exercises, and try to explain the Anglicization of French words. All the while I just want to heave over my desk and throw that newspaper over my head in frustration.
Too bad my lessons don't also end in a jaunty song and dance number.
(And if you don't feel as bad for people learning English as I do, I challenge you to see how well your own pronunciation fares. It's a poem called The Chaos written in 1922 by Gerard Nolst Trenite. It must be read aloud, and points out the inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation in English. I did ok, but had to read it quite slowly. See how you do.)
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