A Tale of French Deficiency, and French Supremacy:
Today we had an extracurricular phonetics class, since we needed to be in a classroom with computers. We're working on the difference between the vowels [y] (like in lu) and [u] (like in loup). We had to record those words (lu, loup) in isolation, and then in a sentence, where the computer would analyze them. This one dumbbbbbbb girl was sitting behind me, and she couldn't get the pronunciation--that's fine, the difference between them is very subtle. Except she pronouncd loup like l'eau, which has the vowel sound [o]. It doesn't take a native speaker of French to hear that [u] and [o] are very different. Her sentence was, "J'ai lu le loup dans la forêt." That means, "I read the wolf in the forest." Hmmm, verily. Anyway I had a good chuckle and then called my friend Andy and had another good chuckle. Yeah, I'm a jerk for laughing at someone who's dumber than me, but I need to feel superior somehow. To hear the difference between loup and lu, go here, type them in, and select Alain or Juliette.