The language below looks like some strange relative of Dutch or Swedish... and it is!
It’s American English, as written in a phrasebook for foreign tourists. Why? Well, it’s difficult to know how an English word is pronounced from how it is written, and it’s doubly hard if you’re completely unfamiliar with the language. The relationship between how English words are pronounced and how they’re spelled can be pretty arbitrary!
So to help readers with the unfamiliar language, this book used pronunciation guides that represent the actual sounds of English words more systematically, and made use of spelling conventions from their own language.
The thirty words above are taken from various word-lists in the phrasebook, and can be sorted into six categories of five words each. Your task is to sort them into six categories.
When you are finished with this problem, click on the button below to check your answers.
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Solution (PDF)
