December 30, 2006
Phonics
We've never had a Swedish cartoon before. This Jan Stenmark example, sent in by Anastasia Nylund, didn't seem very funny at first, but it's been growing on me:
"Daddy, how do you spell 'steam train'?"
"The way it sounds."
"Choo-choo-choo?"
Francis Strand offers some advice about how to pronounce Swedish spelling. Sample:
G - same as English before an A, O, U or Å; but before an E, I, Y, Ä or Ö it is pronounced more or less like a y; it's like in English before consonants, except when at the end of words such as berg or borg, where it sort of disappears as you almost make a y sound but don't really; the other consonant exception is when it comes before an N, such as in barnvagn - baby carriage - the combination of gn becomes like ngn. Finally, it sometimes doesn't follow these rules at all.
Francis has been blogging since August, 2001, under the title "How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons", providing one Swedish word or phrase in each post.
This might be our first Swedish cartoon, but it's not our first phonics cartoon, which was Rob Balder's' "Boy Reading" (from Partially Clips, 7/21/2202), and is worth posting again:
For some excellent (though unfortunately cartoon-free) background, read this.
Posted by Mark Liberman at December 30, 2006 09:29 AM