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Just off the plane and ready to fight
Fresh out of college and on my first trip to France, I hailed a cab at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport and said, in my very best French, "Please take me to the train station." The driver gave me a look that I understood to mean, "WHAT?!" I repeated my request three more times, finding it incredible that a Parisian taxi driver didn't speak French. Finally he turned around in his seat and said in English, "Lady, the word for train station is gare. You're telling me to take you to the guerre. That means the war." Oops. [Editor's note: You may have noticed that this story bears a striking similarity to last month's submission. Clearly, this is a common pronunciation error, so the next time you need to go to the train station in a French-speaking country, make sure that you say gare [gahr] instead of guerre [gehr]!] Tags: French, newsletter, pronunciation
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