English is Write Difficult
The King's English Language
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough
and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, through,
slough and thorough.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and 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 the moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, nor broth in brother.
And there 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 sakes alive!
I'd 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.
I had seen this poem before but when I was brainstorming with a friend for lesson plan ideas and came up with that and some great tongue twisters:
*A Tudor who tooted a flute
tried to tutor two tooters to toot.
Said the two to their tutor,
"Is it harder to toot
or to tutor two tooters to toot?"
*Rubber baby buggy bummers
*Betty Botter had some butter,
"But," she said, "this butter's bitter.
If I bake this bitter butter,
it would make my batter bitter.
But a bit of better butter--
that would make my batter better."
So she bought a bit of butter,
better than her bitter butter,
and she baked it in her batter,
and the batter was not bitter.
So 'twas better Betty Botter
bought a bit of better butter.
*The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.
Or in French (although its funny cause there isn't a word for "tongue twister" in French):
*Un chasseur sachant chasser chassait sans son chien de chasse.
Anyone laughing yet? Cause I am!