The English Lesson Click on The English Lesson to hear me read the poem. You may want to read along with me to get the full picture of just how crazy our spelling system is! Hint: Impossible to get the correct pronunciation relying on our spelling!
By Richard Krough
I take it you already know
Of tough and cough and bough and dough?
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead-
For goodness sake, don’t call it ‘deed’!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up-and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart-
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!
And yet to write it, the more I tried;
I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five!
