Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[strielka.]

Dear Techers,

what does 'clippety clop' mean?


thanks in advance

[Bob S.]

[strielka.]

lol ha ha

thanks Bob

[Bob S.]

Sure thing.
Learning onomatopoeia for a new language is strange, interesting, and fun.

[advoca]

One can have a lot of fun with onomatopoeia, and it can make for a fascinating lesson for students of a foreign language. For example look at the variation in sound for the following:


DOG

English bow wow
French gnaf gnaf
Albanian ham ham
Japanese wan wan
Chinese wang wang
Indonesian gong gong

BIRD

English tweet tweet
Dutch tjielp tjielp
French cui cui
Spanish p�o p�o
Italian cip cip
Japanese chit chit
Hungarian csipcsirip)

(Some of these sound more like each other than they look: Dutch tj-, Italian c- before i, and Hungarian cs- are all pronounced 'ch-')

PIG

English oink oink
French groin groin
Norwegian n�ff n�ff
Croatian rok rok
Polish chrum chrum
Welsh soch soch
Japanese buu buu
Chinese hulu hulu
Hungarian r�f r�f

However, looking at the spelling does not always convey the sound. A better way to learn, and a lot of fun too, is to go to http://www.flat.33.com/buzzspeek/index/html.

Here you will find a collection of onomatopoeia using sound recordings from children of several countries, all native speakers, imitating sounds, mainly animals but also such things as fire engines and railway locomotives. It is a lot of fun for everybody and it shows much similarity and an occasional surprising variation.