I have promised to get back to this. In general many of Chinese speaking people (who has Chinese as their mother tongue) I have met in Sweden don't really properly pronounce Swedish words which ended with a consonant like "b, d, f, h, k, l, m, p, s, t, v. (exception for those who are very good in speaking English, who are also very good in speaking Swedish).
I belong to those group who don't pronounce the last consonants properly when I am tired or careless with my speech, so embarrassed to say this but I am trying hard to control my speech everyday. I am really so thankful to my Swedish friends and guests who have the patience to listen to me, and trying hard to understand what I am trying to tell them, and some of them will smoothly and indirectly correct me by repeating the same words I have pronounced wrongly in their conversation so that I can catch their hint and notice my mistake.
Well, we have to understand that in Chinese's phonetic system, "
Hanyu Pinyin", use these consonants "b, d, f," etc as the first syllable in every Chinese word but don't end the pronunciation in Chinese word with these consonant, and that's why Chinese like me who are careless and not aware about it, will unconsciously forget to pronounce the last consonant in Swedish words clearly and properly which in result will sometimes confuse the Swedish listeners. Furthermore, there are long vowel and short vowel sound in Swedish, and a few other weird (to me) phonetic sounds (please read more about it if you are interested in
Swedish_phonology) which are not even closed to any Chinese phonetic sounds.
So although some Swedish people think I speak fluently but I know I'm still struggling with this Scandinavian language everyday. I have the best Swedish teacher at home, my darling, Mabel who has been trying very hard to guide me and teach me the Swedish pronunciation in many years, and yet, sometimes my mouth and tongue are too tired and too stiff to hit the right tone. Ok, let's cut the story short.. let me start with the best part of today's title.
In Swedish, "
kort" means
"short" ( it can mean"card" too but the pronunciation is different)
Let's focus only on the first one which pronounce as
"k-or-t" . the "or" in between sounds like "O" in English with a slight "r" sound after before ended with the "t" sound.
The word "k
åt" means "horny" in Swedish, which sounds like "
k-O-t", the "
å" sounds like "O" too.
Swedish people in general are super tall and in their eyes I am super short. So, many many years ago I always tried to practice my Swedish with the following line when I met a tall Swedes,
"Hej, du är väldigt lång, jag är väldigt kåt" = "Hi, you are very tall, and I am very horny"
Oops! my "kort" easily became "kåt" sounds. (The problem was I didn't even know what "kåt" meant at that early years when I just started to learn Swedish!)
So, I don't know how many guys' (perhaps) women's sexual imagination have been turned on by me every time I hit that word "kåt" until one day a guest told me I have pronounced the word "kort" wrongly. We have a Swedish karaoke song called " Sommaren är kort" (The Summer is short). I have to pronounce it with microphone every time a guest wants to sing it. So, one night, it was very honest of that one guest who approached me and told me after he sang that song, "The Summer is not horny, are you?"
