Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO) headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language...until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, the verses below were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months hard labour to reading six lines aloud.

Try them yourself.

 

English is tough stuff

Dearest creature in creation,

Study English pronunciation.

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse¹, corps², horse, and worse.

I will keep you, Suzy, busy.

Make your head with heat grow dizzy.

Tear in eye, your dress will tear.

So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard and hears.

Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain.

(Mind the letter, how it's written.)

Now I surely will not plague you

With such words as plaque³ and ague.

But be careful how you speak:

Say break and steak, but bleak⁴ and streak⁵;

Cloven, oven how and low.

Script, receipt, show, poem and toe.

Hear my say, devoid⁶ of trickery.

Daughter, laughter, and Trepsichore.

Typhoid, measles⁷, topsails, aisles⁸.

Exiles, similes⁹, and reviles¹⁰;

Scholar, vicar, and cigar.

Solar, mica¹¹, war and far;

One, anemone¹², Balmoral.

Kitchen, lichen¹³, laundry, laurel:

Gertrude, German, wind and mind.

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