Rhyme

2017年5月2日 (火)

I often tell my students that English speakers like rhymes. Most poems and songs written in English use rhyme, and we study rhyme as children. I can remember doing work sheets in elementary school that asked us to choose the correct word to form a rhyme. For example, a student might have to answer a question like this:

Choose the word that best rhymes with “cat”.

a) market

b) flute

c) flat

d) caught

In high school, we learned that other languages have rhymes, too, but it is mostly European languages that are interested in rhyme. Japanese songs and poetry mostly ignore rhyme, and this is probably because there are only a few ending sounds used in Japanese – so few that most words rhyme. English, on the other hand, has hundreds of possible endings, making rhymes sound interesting.

Rhymes are like fun coincidences in pronunciation, and they make people happy. They also make it easy to guess the next word in a poem. Here are some common rhyming phrases used in English.

Haste makes waste.

A stitch in time saves nine.

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.

See if you can find your own rhyming English sentences.