A Fishy Story G3p08

 A Fishy Story

Nick was a student who came from, shall we say, Ruritania. He was eighteen years old when he first arrived in England to study in London. Like most students he was not very rich, but he managed to make ends meet. He worked in the evening as a receptionist in a hotel. Everybody liked Nick. He was a pleasant, well-mannered, good-natured, humorous fellow. Moreover, he was intelligent. He worked hard; he studied well. He did exceptionally well in the language laboratory and his teachers were very pleased with his progress. But all of them agreed that although his pronunciation and intonation were good, his spelling was poor. This was mainly because in his own language the words were written the same way as they were pronounced.

Nick took his first examination at the end of the year. In one of the tests he had to write the word 'fish'. Curiously enough, he had never seen this word written and he began to wonder how he could spell it. "Well," he said to himself, " [f] ;that's the sound of 'gh' in the word 'cough'." So he wrote 'gh'. " [i] ; well, that's the sound of 'o' in the word 'women'." So he added 'o'. " [ʃ] ;well, that's easy. That's the sound of 's' in the word 'expression' and 't' in 'examination'." So he finally wrote 'g-h-o-s-t'. But in spite of this curious idea Nick passed his examination.