a e i o u

i'm sitting here at my desk practicing phonetics. saying sounds over and over to myself. well, i was practicing until i had the urge to take a break and write something. if you walked into my room just a few seconds ago, you probably would have thought that i had gone crazy. "oo," "uh," "aw," "ah," "ee," "i," "oh," "a," "ur," "e" was all you would have heard. (there are 10 more, but they're hard to type on a keyboard without phonetic symbols!) what?? i thought there were only 5 vowels?! you know, the ones you learned when you were little and learning to read: a, e, i, o, u, and yes, sometimes they stuck that "y" in there. to tell the truth there are at least 20 different vowel sounds used in standard american english. we haven't even mentioned the consonants... thankfully those are easier to master.

i'm going to share a secret with you, my blog readers. ok, it's not really a secret, but anyway... i am a pretty bad speller. i always try to spell words the way they sound, which unfortunately doesn't work so well in english. when I was little i hated french words or french inspired spellings. it took me over 2 years to learn to spell "chauffeur" and get it right on a spelling test. really, it did. i must have learned it very well, because i can still rattle it off without thinking. moving on... one of the greatest things about learning phonetics is that i can actually spell when i write with phonetic symbols. every word is written exactly as it sounds. i don't have to worry about weird letter combinations that represent the same sound, silent letters, or any other odd english spelling rules. even my phonetics professor can't spell in english. i don't feel so bad. :)

now, if only i could have had my spelling tests in phonetics... hey, now there's an idea!