Introduction to French pronounciation, with audio

Audio samples require Quicktime to be installed.

First of all, to understand my concept, you need to understand that in French (as in English), the same sound can often be spelled different ways, and will still sound the same.
Ex : the sound ‘ee’ in scene and seen. The sound sh in show, station, Sean.

But good news !! French is much more predictable than English : sounds can only be written certain ways, so it's rather logical and with training, not too difficult to read French with a decent pronounciation.

English and French differ in some ways ; in French...

vowels are stonger than consonants, which are only here to "link" the vowels together.
consonants are often silent at the end of a word : most words end on a vowel sound.
the rhythm is very even ; we no not have syllable longer than others. When it's difficult to say a word, just say it slowly, one syllable at a time.
there is no tonic accent in French (like there is in Spanish or English) ; all syllable have the same strengh, and accents marks do not show a tonic accent but rather a sound difference.
liaisons are very important, but difficult to explain. Pay attention to them since you'll need to develop an ear for them.
written and spoken French can be quite different. We glide over a lot of letters, that often disappear in spoken French.

I have chosen not to use the phonetic alphabet, that many of us don’t know, but rather a logical way of representing the sounds. The vowels will be written in uppercase (since they are strong), consonants in lowercase and nasal vowels will be underlined.

Tip : to remember the pronounciation of a sound, it is a good idea to link that sound to a word in your native language, or even better to a word in French that you know. For exemple, most people pronounce correctly the words "tu" and "vous", but have difficulty with U and OU in words. So take "tu" as your anchor, your reference, and when you say a more difficult word, like "bulle", say "tu" first, then "bulle". Same with "vous" ; "roule" is the same sound as "vous".

There are 4 pages to this lesson, click on the underlined links to access them:
Vowels
Vowels part 2 - and nasal vowels
Accents, silent letters, liaisons and elision
Consonants




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