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• If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

• After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.

• Dearest creature in creation,

• Study English pronunciation.

• I will teach you in my verse

• Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

• I will keep you, Suzy, busy,

• Make your head with heat grow dizzy.

• Tear in eye, your dress will tear.

• So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

• Just compare heart, beard, and heard,

• Dies and diet, lord and word,

• Sword and sward, retain and Britain.

• (Mind the latter, how it’s written.)

• Now I surely will not plague you

• With such words as plaque and ague.

• But be careful how you speak:

• Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;

• Cloven, oven, how and low,

• Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

• Hear me say, devoid of trickery,

• Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,

• Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,

• Exiles, similes, and reviles;

• Scholar, vicar, and cigar,

• Solar, mica, war and far;

• One, anemone, Balmoral,

• Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;

• Gertrude, German, wind and mind,

• Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

• Billet does not rhyme with ballet,

• Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.

• Blood and flood are not like food,

• Nor is mould like should and would.

• Viscous, viscount, load and broad,

• Toward, to forward, to reward.

• And your pronunciation’s OK

• When you correctly say croquet,

• Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,

• Friend and fiend, alive and live.

• Ivy, privy, famous; clamour

• And enamour rhyme with hammer.

• River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,

• Doll and roll and some and home.

• Stranger does not rhyme with anger,

• Neither does devour with clangour.

• Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,

• Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,

• Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,

• And then singer, ginger, linger,

• Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,

• Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

• Query does not rhyme with very,

• Nor does fury sound like bury.

• Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.

• Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.

• Though the differences seem little,

• We say actual but victual.

• Refer does not rhyme with deafer.

• Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.

• Mint, pint, senate and sedate;

• Dull, bull, and George ate late.

• Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,

• Science, conscience, scientific.

• Liberty, library, heave and heaven,

• Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.

• We say hallowed, but allowed,

• People, leopard, towed, but vowed.

• Mark the differences, moreover,

• Between mover, cover, clover;

• Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,

• Chalice, but police and lice;

• Camel, constable, unstable,

• Principle, disciple, label.

• Petal, panel, and canal,

• Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.

• Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,

• Senator, spectator, mayor.

• Tour, but our and succour, four.

• Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

• Sea, idea, Korea, area,

• Psalm, Maria, but malaria.

• Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.

• Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

• Compare alien with Italian,

• Dandelion and battalion.

• Sally with ally, yea, ye,

• Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.

• Say aver, but ever, fever,

• Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.

• Heron, granary, canary.

• Crevice and device and aerie.

• Face, but preface, not efface.

• Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.

• Large, but target, gin, give, verging,

• Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.

• Ear, but earn and wear and tear

• Do not rhyme with here but ere.

• Seven is right, but so is even,

• Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,

• Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,

• Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

• Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)

• Is a paling stout and spikey?

• Won’t it make you lose your wits,

• Writing groats and saying grits?

• It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:

• Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,

• Islington and Isle of Wight,

• Housewife, verdict and indict.

• Finally, which rhymes with enough,

• Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?

• Hiccough has the sound of cup.

• My advice is to give up!!!

• http: //www.thepoke.co.uk/2011/12/23/english-pronunciation/

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   JUST TRY THIS!!! 3:)

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