How do you say the b-word?

I know I'm a bit behind in my posts, but part of our conversation at dinner tonight was just too amusing for me not to share (I'll get back to my older posts later this week).

I spend quite a bit of time going over the pronunciation of different English words - with both the family I'm living with and the kids at the center.

The other day at the youth center, I kept repeating "thirty" and tried to have the students recognize that it isn't pronounced "t-eee-rty." (The "th" sound doesn't really exist in French.)

Accents really can get in the way - the other day I kept telling Philippe that I didn't know the movie he was referring to until after about the sixth repetition, I realized he was saying Easy Rider. This happens a lot - hippy, Johnny Hallyday (singer), and others I can't remember right now. Accents really are tricky and can impede understanding, so whenever I notice a word that needs some fixing, or if I am asked to help improve pronunciation, I'm all for working on it.

Tonight, Emeline and Seb came over for crepes (they were so good - every day I say I'm going to stop eating like this, but each day just brings something so good I can't help but enjoy it), which we made on a frying pan that made 6 mini-crepes at a time. We enjoyed crepes sales - savory crepes that were made with buckwheat flour and topped with gruyere cheese, tomatoes, meat - for me turkey, for others ham, and fried eggs - as well as crepes sucres - with toppings that included the salted caramel sauces Marcy bought for the family in Saint Malo.

During dinner, somehow the pronunciation of bitch v. beach came up (they were saying both the same).

I calmly explained that beach = la plage and it is pronounced like bee-ch and bitch is approximately equivalent to une salope and is pronounced bich. I kept repeating the first syllable "bi" until folks had the hang of it. Then, everyone (mom, dad, and kids included) spent a good 3 - 5 minutes practicing saying each word correctly.

So, though Philippe and Marie-Christine's English is limited (zucchini, you're welcome, thank you, bagel, to name a few), they can now add the b-word, said correctly, to their growing list.

I also worked with Brice on a couple of brief English writing assignments for about 1 1/2 hours, so all-in-all, I think we accomplished a lot today as far as English learning goes!