Grammar Pulis

A Ba Ka Da E Ga Ha- That's the Filipino alphabet I grew up with. I know that this has now evolved into a new alphabet that looks so much like the English one. But, I suppose a whole lot of Filipinos learned the alphabet without an F. And that makes it undestandable when people say pour instead of four, pamily pirst instead of family first. I get it. F is hard to pronounce.

What boggles my mind and offends my ears is hearing people use the f sound for words that are spelled with a p. It's ferpectly understandable the other way around, but how did that uncalled for F come about? Flease fass the rice , black feffer, tof 10.

Now, here's my constructive suggestion.

Fractice, erm practice, practice, practice.

If you get your f's and p's mixed up, you can practice pronouncing these pairs of words.

F - P
feel - peel
four - pour
fine - pine
foot - put
fork - pork
fast - past
fart - part
fare - pare
fat - pat
fail - pail
far - par
fore - pore
faint - paint
fool - pool
fit - pit
face - pace
few - pew
fan - pan
fad - pad
fashion - passion


Read them twice daily at first until you get them right. Then, do it weekly. Make sure you apply them in your conversations. Eventually you won't need to practice that frequently; just do refresher drills when you think you're reverting back to your old ways. If you have a friend whom you can trust in pronunciation, let her listen to you. Be open to suggestions, and don't take it personally if your friend snickers sometimes. In time, you will learn to pronounce your f's and p's perfectly.