English is Tough Stuff

English is Tough Stuff:

"We've all cursed written English as capricious and sentenced American Pronunciation Rules as but half-truths at best. Examples and practice always seem better than studying worn and obsolete phonetic guides.

Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization 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 at hard labor to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.

(Read aloud, with a friend!)
(After all, laughter is the true universal language!)"