Saturday, June 16, 2007

Pronouncing the word 'delicious'

How do you tell a 7-year-old kid that her English teacher at school is wrong? And she still insists that it is right to pronounce 'delicious' as deh-li-cious?

I've told her (my student from my tuition class) that the right and only way to say it is di-li-cious but I guess she doesn't believe me!

The teacher (from school) is always right when you talk to small kids. Can't blame because they see their school teachers almost everyday and think the world of them. Even when their teacher is wrong, they still say that teacher is right.

It's kind of hard teaching small kids. They get restless easily. But 2 hours of English is quite enough. Enough for me and enough for the kids. I also like to teach when the student is paying attention and willing to learn. It is going to be tough if the student is a difficult one.

Well, I think I'll only be a teacher for a couple more weeks since future varsity students have to register at their universities on the 1st of July 2007. The university results will be out by the middle of next week! On Thursday, 2 days ago, my friend sent me as SMS saying that we could check the results on Friday. It's a false alarm actually.

Anyway, good luck to all students and teachers who are right and wrong!

5 comments:

  1. I have similar experience - like u i teach kids at home. I tried telling them that its 'vejtebles'(for vegetables)and not 'veggie-tables' but they come back the next day and still get it wrong. Also they don't read the 's' at the end of plurals like animals is animal to them. Do u have that experience? I'm not sure if this is right but one student said she doesn't read the 'es' or 's' coz it sounds like death in chinese. I think she was pulling my leg. I'm not from Malaysia so i can't argue with her abt the language!! What's ur take on this??

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  2. anonymous: Hi! Yes, sometimes, they forget to say the s in plural words. Haha! I'm not sure if it's true or not if that's the reason why they don't like to say 's'.

    But, in Hokkien, 'si' means the number 4 and it can also mean death. In Mandarin, 'seh'(or something like that)(e as in the), means 4 and 'sei' means death. Hmm, saying 's' in English doesn't sound anything like death to me!

    And most Chinese (even superstitious ones!) in Malaysia pronounce the s in plural words, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with it!

    little ray: Hi little ray, thanks!

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  3. Thanks for clearing that up for me. Well how creative of that student of mine to come up with the 'death' explanation! And to think i nearly bought that. I don't like to sound anonymous but those of us who don't have blogs but love reading them have no other choice! So i'll just sign off here with my real name.
    Beenu

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  4. Hi Beenu, it's okay! Haha! You can still put your name without putting a blog. And I hope everything goes well with that creative student of yours! Haha!

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