Chose/Choose

I always have trouble with those two. Like, I ALWAYS have to think of both of them together and then pick the one I want for a given situation. I have no idea why it's such an issue.

Except...

Do they follow almost the opposite pattern of other words? Like, loose/lose... Choose rhymes with lose, right? Loose doesn't really rhyme with Chose, though...

Is there some other pair of words that goes from a single o to a double o? This is bugging me, now.

 

Yeah, "Choose" rhymes with "lose".

Choose/chose are kind of weird. I've never had problems with them, but I can see why some people do. A friend of mine had lots of issues with the distinction, too.

 

But what the hell is going on with the SPELLING?!? Why can't the spelling be more consistent?

(I do also mess up breathe and breath if I don't stop and think about it, so possibly I'm just a bad speller of similar words, but... grrrrr)

 

What's wrong with the spelling? 0-consonant-e pretty much always makes the sound in "chose". Home, phone, bone, throne... "Lose" is the exception, not "chose".
The same can be said for oo-consonant (with or without an e) pretty much always making the sound in "loose" and "choose".

 

Trust me, I feel where this particular lack of confidence in the choose/chose, loose/lose paradigm enters into play. It happens to me too, always. For similar reasons regarding the manner in which I am analyzing the phonemes, I want the verb lead to follow the same rules as read for tense, and led always looks like some internet-induced, nonstandard neologistic shortening. I know it's correct, but there's a checksum error somewhere in my brain that says wrong!

 

Do you have trouble remembering how they're pronounced, or remembering which one's the past tense and which is the present tense?

For pronunciation, as others have said, look at -oo. Food, loose, moose, goose, choose.

Chose follows the rules regarding "the magic E", where a word that ends with an E will lengthen the vowel preceding it. Another way to think of it is vowel-consonant-e. As a Chinese child back when I first learnt about phonics, I came up with my own rule: where a word ends with an E, the vowel before it is pronounced like its name, not its sound. Ride (I is pronounced like the word I instead of the sound the letter makes, like in 'sit'). Make (the A is pronounced like the letter A, not like its sound as in 'apple'). This applies for all vowels.

So, pose, mode, rode, hose, chose.

In terms of present and past tense though, I'm afraid that's just memorisation, but since you're Canadian (I think?), you will probably know this by saying the word out loud. Then follow the normal English phonics system to figure out which word sounds like which, and voila!

English spelling is much fun for foreigners in general. You may enjoy Czech - an entirely phonetic language. It makes spelling a pain though whenever similar or identical sounds occur lol. Anyway, you're probably familiar with this poem:

http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html

Apparently even most native speakers can't read the whole thing out loud accurately.

 

As in all things, I defer to The Simpsons

 

But, but... choose doesn't rhyme with loose or moose or goose! Choose rhymes with lose. "I choose to lose..." (Well, now lose looks wrong. But it isn't, I don't think...)

And, no, I don't have trouble remembering how they're pronounced, or which tense they are. I just mess up the spelling.

 

So how do Canadians pronounce loose, goose and moose? How do they not rhyme with "Choose"?

You're right of course that choose and lose also rhyme.

Since you have no problem with pronouncing them, maybe just say the word out loud when you type it. Chose definitely rhymes with pose and nose. So if you can memorise one, then the other must follow the other rule!

I'm getting confused as to just what you're struggling with. I understand it's the spelling, but I am confused as to how that's erm... confusing. Since you don't have trouble remembering what tense they are or their pronunciation, why would you have trouble spelling them?

 

If choose and lose rhyme, how could choose and loose rhyme, unless loose and lose are pronounced the same (which they aren't)?

loose, goose, moose, caboose

choose, news, lose, blues

 

According to Oxford Dictionary, these are the phonemic scripts for the words

Choose: /tʃuːz/
Moose: /muːs/
Goose: /ɡuːs/

The z and s is technically not a rhyme, but when the words are pronounced the difference is so slight you barely hear it. I guess based on that, you could argue it is not technically a rhyme, but for all intents and purposes they certainly sound rhymey. And certainly the vowel sound u in question is identical, thus the example of figuring out the spelling of Choose in relation to Moose and Goose would apply.

To add:

Lose: /luːz/
Loose: /luːs/

Again, the vowel sound in question is the same, with a very technical difference in the z and s sounds. So, they do basically rhyme, though arguably do not rhyme technically.

I guess the slight difference does make it technically not a rhyme. But I don't think it's the final voiced/unvoiced s/z that's tripping Bay up.

 

Loose and lose are basically pronounced the same (see the phonemic thingy I copied from OED in my previous post) - their vowel sounds are certainly the same. At least, in British English. I am really beginning to think you need to specify what type of English you're referring to, as it appears we're disagreeing over pronunciation and we can't really have a productive conversation about this unless we know which version of English we're referring to.

The inclusion of "news" surprised me though - but apparently you're right it's still the same vowel sound! I was probably thrown off by the j sound in /njuːz/

 

I'm Canadian, so... Canadian English, I guess.

What kind of English are you talking about? There's a "j" sound in news???

 

That's a neat wee trick! I suspect there will be exceptions, but there always are. It's a good rule of thumb, though. (Erm ...rule? The vowel 'u' is pronounced 'yoo.' But we say the 'u' in 'rule' like 'ooh.' Close enough, I suppose. But then we have 'there...' sigh....)

 

That

That rule is called the "Magic e" (https://www.theschoolrun.com/what-magic-e). I've only come across it in the last few years while teaching my children to read. It's surprising how much that teaches you more about the rules of English that you've just internalised up to then.

 

It's like the 'i' before 'e' except after 'c' thing. Very useful MOST of the time. However, there are plenty of exceptions. But in general...

Mind you we still have and use a dictionary (or two) at our house.

 

Goose... geese.
Why isn't a group of mongooses called, mongeese?

 

Moose, meese.

 

And oh yes, the other words that instantly get me googling... wake, awake, awaken, woke, awoke, awoken.

I favor, wake and woke in most cases, and for some reason really hate the word, awoken.

 

Some people pronounce "news" as "nooz", some people pronounce is as "nyooz". Our good friend Mckk is using the international phonetic alphabet to describe the sounds in question, which is incredibly valuable as a tool as long as all parties understand it (and in said IPA, /j/ represents the sound that y does in English).

I've got to admit that I'm also struggling to see where the difficulty really lies. You're a native speaker, so you don't confuse them in speech, and the spelling truly is consistent within the rules of English spelling, such as they are. "Lose" is the oddball, in that it is pronounced /lu:z/, with a long u and a z on the end, but is spelt /loʊz/, with an "oh" sound.

"oo-consonant-e" is so often pronounced with the long u, and the exceptions are ones that you, as a native speaker, probably never give a second thought.
"o-consonant-e" is so often pronounced with an "oh" sound, with the exception of "lose", that the same can be said.
With that in mind, it should be pretty simple to keep them straight.

 

It's worth pointing out that pretty much all of these idiosyncrasies come from Old English, which had a bunch of (fairly) regular rules for how vowels would change when the word became plural, or the tense changed. Mouse-mice, louse-lice, swim-swam-swum, drink-drank-drunk, write-wrote-written, smite-smote-smitten, grow-grew-grown, throw-threw-thrown.
Except, of course, the language changed and new words stopped following these rules because sticking an -s or an -ed on the end was easier, and some older words went the same way. And then sound changes got involved and confused things even more, such as how foot-feet used to go along with goose-geese, but the vowel in foot changed.

All of which is to say that there are rules at play, they often just need some squinting to spot, and in some cases are only recognisable these days in the spellings which fossilised 700 years or so ago when the pronunciations still made sense.

 

What are the other words that rhyme with choose and are end with -oose?