Daily Archive for August 11th, 2008
The Monday Maestro explains some jokes in English related to pronunciation
Hello everyone,
after my post last week to get you thinking about vowel sounds in English, I promised you a joke related to pronunciation. Often it is hard to understand English jokes when you are learning English. Here are seven simple jokes related to pronunciation which all contain an interesting learning point. |
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Match the question to the answer
Question
- What do you call a pig with three eyes?
- What goes Oh, Oh, Oh?
- Where do you find giant snails?
- What starts with E, ends with E and only has one letter?
- When does the (English) alphabet have only 25 letters?
- What happens when “you” and “I” are gone?
- What letter of the alphabet is an insect?
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Answer
- At Christmas time, because it is the time of Noel.
- Only 24 letters are left
- A piiig.
- An envelope.
- On the ends of their fingers.
- B
- Santa Claus walking backwards.
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| Answers (don’t look until you have thought about it!)
1 – c, 2 – g, 3 – e, 4 – d, 5- a, 6 – b, 7 – f
Explanation
- Q: What do you call a pig with three eyes?
A: A piiig. It doesn’t have three ‘eyes’ but three ‘i’s!
- Q: What goes Oh, Oh, Oh?
A: Santa Claus walking backwards. … Because he is a happy guy he is normally laughing “Ho, ho, ho”
- Q: Where do you find giant snails?
A: On the ends of their fingers. … This depends on a feature of English pronunciation where it is difficult to say where
the sound of the 1st word ends and the sound of the 2nd word begins so is it
“giant
snails”
or “giants’ nails“?
- Q: What starts with E, ends with E and only has one letter?
A: An envelope…. The word ‘envelope’ begins and ends with the letter ‘e’ and an envelope is what you use to post a letter
- Q: When does the (English) alphabet have only 25 letters?
A: At Christmas time, because it is the time of Noel. …The synonym in English (and many languages) Christmas is Noel which sounds like “no ‘L’”
- Q: What happens when “you” and “I” are gone?
A: Only 24 letters are left. … Similar to the previous one. you=the letter “u” and I the letter “i”.)
- Q: What letter of the alphabet is an insect?
A: B. … the letter ‘B’ is pronounced like the word ‘bee‘
These jokes and some others can be found at this site for EFL teachers The Internet TESL journal.
More jokes here.
Languagelab is not responsible for the content of outside sites.
That’s all for now. Next week is grammar. Yummy! |
