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Prisoners of pronunciation
The funny and bizarre mistakes teachers hear in language classes must fill many, many notebooks. I studied French in high school. One year, my French teacher asked everyone in the class to give a presentation on a current event. This was just after the first Gulf War, so many of the presentations had to do with war situations. My partner and I got up in front of the class with our carefully planned presentation, but as soon as we began speaking, we knew we were doing something wrong. The teacher was laughing uncontrollably, and we couldn't figure out why. Once he'd composed himself, he was able to inform us that due to an error in our French pronunciation, we were in fact giving a very serious presentation on les prisonniers de gare (prisoners of the train station) instead of les prisonniers de guerre (prisoners of war). As we now know, gare (train station) is pronounced [gahr], while guerre (war) is pronounced [gehr]. Lesson learned. —Suzanne (New York) Tags: class, French, newsletter, story
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