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Pronunciation guide

A major shortcoming of most French books is that they lack robust pronunciation guides. French spelling has some particular curiosities that can be quite different from English spelling. For instance “ch” is pronounced as “sh”, and “j” is pronounced as the “s” in “vision”. More problematically there are many silent letters, and a total of six phonemes that don’t occur in English. To ensure the most accurate pronunciation this book uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represented in slanted brackets.

French consonants that occur in English

/t/ as in stop /d/ as in do /p/ as in spa /b/ as in bad /k/ as in kill /g/ as in go /f/ as in far /v/ as in vat /s/ as in say /z/ as in zoo /m/ as in more /n/ as in no / as in king /l/ as in like /sh/ asin she zsa as in vision /w/ as in way /j/ as in you

French consonants that do not occur in English

The French R, sometimes called the “guttural R”, is a distinctly French sound, produced with the back of the tongue against the uvula (that small dangling thing in the back of your mouth). This sound may be difficult for English speakers to master. Substituting /_/ for an English R will render your accent very English sounding, but you will still be intelligible to speakers.

To an English speaker /n/ is virtually identical to an /n/, although it is in fact produced with the tongue slightly further back, touching the top of the roof, however not as a far back /ng/. Linguists report that /n/ is slowly morphing into /nj/ in many regions of France (remembering that /j/ is a “y” sound in IPA). My advice to new speakers would be to treat /n/as /nj/.

Is technically a /j/ as in “yes” with rounded lips. This rounding effect has a tendency to make it sound more like a /w/ “we”. It occurs in nuit.

French vowels that occur in English About Father See Red Bay No You Law

Rounded vowels

As it is not possible to convey exactly how these phonemes sound through description only, the following website has examples of pronunciation. Alternatively Wikipedia provides audio examples of every single IPA symbol on its article on “International Phonetic Alphabet”.

There are three “rounded” vowels that do no not occur in English, although their unrounded counter parts do. If you pronounce the words “see”, “red” and “bay” you will notice that your lips are not rounded. Contrast this with the pronunciation of “you”, a rounded vowel that does occur in English. To achieve the French rounded vowels simply pronounce “see”, “red” and “bay” with rounded lips.

As in See (with rounded lips). This is the rounded version of /i/, however the rounding effects tends to make it sound more similar to /u/, and indeed, // occurs in many words that are spelled with a “u” such as une /_n/ and tu /t-/.

Red (with rounded lips). This vowel mostly occurs in vowels that are spelled with “eu” peur /p_r/

Bay (with rounded lips). Just as /e/ is a slightly shorter version of the vowel in “bay”, _ is slightly shorterned version of he vowel in “bay” with rounded lips.

Nasal vowels

Nasalization occurs when a vowel is pronounced with air escaping through the nose as well as the mouth. Nasal vowels are represented with a _ over the vowel. They occur in English when a vowel comes before an “n”. To illustrate this, say to the word “grand”, preparing to ennciate the “n’ but stopping right before it. If done correctly you will notice a slight nasal effect in the vowel. In French this phenomenon is much more pronounced, so much so that there is a meaningful difference between nasal and non-nasal vowels: the words beau /bo/ “beautiful” and bon /bo/ “good” differ only in nasalization of the vowel.

Liaison

In French most consonants at the end of words are silent. For example. Even consonant clusters are silent. Liaison is process of pronouncing these silent consonants when the following word begins with a vowel. (Because of liaison, consonants at the end of words are actually said to be “latent”, not “silent”)

As you will note in the example above, the pronunciation of liaised consonants is not perfectly intuitive; an “s” is realized as /z/.

Liaison does not occur in every context. It usually occurs in

Other IPA symbols

Slanted brackets, eg /f/,
 * means the vowel is slightly more elongated than normal

The pronunciation of a word is marked slanted brackets: les /le/. Pronunciation of a full sentence is marked by square brackets to indicate that : les amis [lez amis].