Available; what a funny word?!

Hey :)

Do you remember having problems about learning a special word? I am not talking about the translation of it, on the contrary, I mean to know the right spelling AND pronunciation of it. Was it maybe a word you have never heard before and suddenly it appeared in a text? How did you manage to learn it? Did you ignore it? Just overflew it? Or did you do some research about that word? Can you still remember the word and do you know how to use it right?

Due to the fact, that I am learning English as a foreign language I have come across many difficult words in the past. But there is one word I have learned, I will never forget in my life. It is: AVAILABLE :) I know, it is not a very interesting word and there might be more difficult ones out there, but the story of how I learned this word might be quite interesting for you.

In the year 2006 Viki (a classmate in grammar school) and I had to prepare a presentation about Empress Maria Theresa for our history class. Due to a lack of time management, Viki and I had to work on this speech in the night before the history class in which we should present it. We drank a lot of coffee and read through our documents.Even though we had to held the speech in English, at that time we first wrote the speech in German and translated it into English afterwards. I know that this was not a very good strategy, but we didn’t knew it better. However, I needed a translation for the German word ‘verfügbar’ and searched in an online dictionary for it. I found the translation ‘available’ but I was not satisfied. On the contrary, I had big troubles of pronouncing it right. I knew this was the right translation and all the other synonyms I have found were not close enough. So I asked Viki if she could help me with the pronunciation of ‘available’. Because of her funny tries we decided to search in the online dictionary for help. We found a dictionary which offered an audio file. We were both very excited about the true pronunciation of the word and pressed play. As the voice said this word, both, Viki and I started to laugh out loud. We didn’t expect the word to be so easy and because it was a very funny ‘dictionary-voice’ we clicked on the ‘play-button’ over and over again. I will never forget this voice and the way it pronounced ‘available’. Even though we just had fun with the pronunciation, I also remembered the right spelling of it. While listening to ‘available’ I divided it into two parts: into ‘avai’ and ‘lable’. I tried to say it a few times and then I tried it without reading. After a few minutes I remembered the word and the right spelling of it. All in all, I learned how easy it gets to remember an odd word when something funny or unexpected happens at the same time. However, when I come across the word ‘available’ nowadays, it still gives me the giggles. :)