Hi, this is Gabe from Towerofbabelfish.com
We're going to look at French pronunciation, and we'll break it up into two parts:
One, learning how to hear and say the sounds accurately.
Two, learning the connection between the way words are spelled and the way they sound.
This video addresses the first of these goals, which is itself best addressed in two parts
- here, we'll talk about theory - where your tongue should be, what your lips are doing,
etc. This will get you in the general ballpark.
To get more accurate, you'll need to do some careful listening and mimicking of recordings
- you're looking for words that sound similar to your ear but are pronounced differently
- roux and rue, nôtre and notre, etc. You'll find resources for this in the video description
and I'm in the process of making an Anki deck with native speaker recordings to help.
If you haven't seen the first three videos on English pronunciation, go do that now,
especially the vowels video, because French vowels are tricky and you need to know what's
going on in your mouth in English before you try to add French to the mix.
So! Let's get started. French has 21 consonants and at least 15 vowels, compared with English's
24 consonants and ~13 vowels. Of these, you'll need to learn 3 fairly new consonant sounds,
8 fairly new vowels, and some little adjustments to your English sounds here and there. We'll
start with the vowels, since they're a bit harder.
I'm going to be comparing everything to American English. If you have a different dialect,
the principles are the same. Remember, the goal is to understand what's going on in your
mouth, and then move in the direction of the French sounds. The fine tuning occurs later,
when you work with recordings.
First, we'll talk about the vowels that French and English share.
/i/ as in beat or "lit" are both more or less the same - they're frontal, closed and unrounded.
/E/ as in chaise or bet is also about the same. This vowel rides the front side of the
trapezoid, and is much more open than /i/ /u/ as in boot is very close to the French.
French is a little more backed and I'd say a little more rounded than some dialects of
English, which might pronounce this name as Lou, and in French "loue" - you need make
absolutely sure that your lips are in a tight circle, out in front. "loue"
One thing about speaking French is that it uses the lips muscles quite a bit more than
English does. French has 8 rounded vowels, compared with English's 3-4, and even with
the unrounded vowels, there's a bit of lip tension, as if they're getting ready to say
one of the rounded vowels. So if you feel your lips getting tired, you're probably doing
it right.
You'll recognize a few more of these vowel symbols in the French vowel chart.
We've seen /O/ as a pot, /a/ as in father, and /e/ as in the diphthong "LANE" and the
British "bed", and we've seen the schwa, as in about and the tree.
As I mentioned at the end of the English vowels video, these tell you approximately what to
expect in terms of rounding, backness and height, but aren't 100% precise. These 4 vowels
sound slightly different in French, so we'll use the English sounds we know and work towards
the French sounds.
Feel free to pause the video occasionally and practice some of these sounds, or watch
it a few times.
So!
The English open O, /O/ as in talk is further back than the french /O/ as in toc. To get
a sense of front and back in this position, compare the English pot and pet for a moment,
and notice how your tongue comes forward for E. For the French open /O/, you'll let your
tongue come just slightly forward from the English open O - say just 25% of that motion
- in the direction of E to get un toc. Comparing similar french and English words, we have
(odd, talk)
/a/ as in father is a bit more open and a bit further back compared with the French
/a/. We'll do the exact same thing we just did
with the open O, this time comparing father and fat. FAT is more closed and more frontal
than FATHER, and that's exactly what we want to put into our French vowel. Notice how your
tongue moves slightly up and slightly forward for /ae/,
Again, we take 25% of that motion from /a/ to /ae/. So where with an american accent
you would say: tah, in French you would say "ta": la bas, lama
I'm not going to make a distinction between the two /a/ vowels in French, because I haven't
met many French speakers who do. This distinction is disappearing in the French language, and
you can see how much overlap there is already in the vowel chart. If you want to put these
two sounds into your French, you'll use the same technique, and you'll need to find some
recordings of French speakers who really make a difference between words like patte and
pâte, which I don't do accurately enough to teach very well.
The "closed e", /e/ is substantially more closed in French than it is in English - as
in the first half of the English diphthong ei "A" or the British "bed." We'll get at
it in two ways, one from I, and one from the open E. One of these will probably be easier
for you, depending upon whether you have a better sense of your tongue's height or of
its backness. We'll go from ih first. Comparing pit to put should give you a sense of coming
forward on the I and back on the U. To get to /e/, you need to go a bit further forward
with the rounded part of your tongue. Starting with uh, you're going forward to ih, and then
even further to /e/
If we come from the open E, we can compare the heights of E and i, and we'll go about
halfway between them to get /e/. Comparing all 3 sounds, we get, les lits, été les
grèves
At this point, we can talk about the rounded vowels. As I mentioned earlier, French uses
many more rounded vowels than English does, and three of these come from rounding the
frontal vowels i, e, and E. In English, the only rounded vowels are backed bowels like
u, and PUT and CAUGHT and diphthongs like "O", so we need to learn to make rounded frontal
vowels.
When you go from the vowel /i/ to /u/, your tongue naturally tends to back as soon as
your lips round, so for French you need to learn to separate those two movements. We'll
start from the vowel "i".
When you start from "i" and try to round your lips, your tongue will likely pull back just
a little bit, which is exactly what we want. If you look at the chart, can see that all
the rounded front vowels are all a little further back than their unrounded siblings.
If I really try to force a tongue position of /i/ and round my lips - i start with /i/
and round my lips to YYY, then I'm not quite there. However, if I let my tongue do what
it wants to do naturally and pull back a bit, then I'll get /y/.
Comparing these two vowels, we get i and y, and comparing these two, we get /y/ and /u/
You can do the same thing with the other two rounded vowels.
For eu as in "Feu", we can either go from our new vowel /e/, or maybe easier, you can
start with a familiar vowel from english, I, and keep your tongue from moving quite
as much.
For oeu as in "coeur", you can go from open E to OE: maire, meurre
The schwa in French, like the schwa in English, is an unclear, unaccented vowel. To my ear,
the French schwa is almost identical to the closed rounded EU as in feu. Some dialects
will let it open up a bit, in the direction of coeur. No matter what, it's rounded and
frontal, and I'd stick to keeping it closed.
So..if you've studied French, then you might notice something is missing from this vowel
chart - where are the vowels for words like un, cinq, onze, cent?
French has 3 or 4 nasal vowels, during which air is allowed to escape through the nose
at the same time as the mouth. If I pinch my nose while trying to say those four words,
I'd get un, cinq, onze, cent, compared with, say coeur, brève, sauter, sache.
English does this a little bit, like how the vowel in the word 'and' is different from
'add', but we always move into an 'n' or 'm' consonant, and in French, you don't, in general.
Like any vowels, the nasal vowels in french have specific characteristics of roundness,
backness and height - they just have a nasal component too.
To mark this in IPA, you take the vowel that has the 3 characteristics you want, and you
add the nasal diacritic. So for the first vowel, ã, as in cent, sans, you start with
a tongue and mouth position of /a/ as in 'sa', and you nasalize it. cent sans.
The next nasal vowel is rounded and backed, and usually written as an open /O/ in dictionaries,
though some linguists are arguing for /o/, since it's it's actually become a bit more
closed in recent years. I'll go from /o/ as well, Comparing these two words, we have beau
bon, o, on,
It doesn't really matter which symbol you use, as long as you get a good sense of the
sound, and you know what's meant when you see it in a dictionary.
The third nasal vowel is a nasalized open /E/, and is found in words spelled 'in' and
'im': vingt, cinq, simple. Comparing these two words, we have sec cinq e E
The fourth nasal vowel doesn't exist in all dialects of French.
It shows up in words spelled with 'un' or 'um', and is based on the rounded open "oe"
as in coeur. Many French speakers just use the nasalized open E, and you're free to do
the same.
I like the distinction, personally, and you can hear it when comparing the words: brin
brun, For many French speakers, these words are the same. brin brin
Those are the French vowels, and that's the main hard part. French doesn't really have
diphthongs, though they do have three approximants, which are close to diphthongs, just the timing's
different. You can't stay on approximants; you have to move on to the vowels.
two of them are familiar: /j/ and /w/, based on /i/ and /u/, respectively, and producing
glides like
/wi/ /roi/ as well as /veillé/ /brouillant/
The third is fairly foreign sounding, as it's based on the rounded front vowel /y/. Again,
it's like an /i/ with lip rounding. If you want to think about it in consonant terms,
it's a labialized palatal approximant, meaning that the lips are tightly rounded, like the
labialized velar approximant /w/, but instead of the back of the tongue coming up towards
your soft palate, like in /w/, the middle of the tongue comes up towards the roof of
your mouth.
English speakers often have a hard time distinguishing the two labial approximants, and works like:
huis oui, lui and Louis. are sometimes hard to tell apart. If you practice repeating after
recordings of difficult pairs like those, it will make a huge difference in both your
accent and your listening comprehension.
If you look at the rest of the consonant chart, all but two should be pretty familiar from
English - Those two would be the uvular R and the palatal nasal /n/. We'll start with
the palatal nasal.
The palatal nasal is made with the middle of the tongue touching the roof of your mouth
- "agneau" "anneau"
As for the uvular R, it has a few variants. They're all uvular, though the manner can
change a bit from region to region and from person to person.
You have the uvular trill, the uvular fricative (which seems the most common), the uvular
approximant, and the unvoiced uvular fricative. Some of these sound weird out of context,
but if I stick them in a word like "arrondissement", they make a lot more sense.
I'd go for the voiced uvular fricative if I were to pick one, but you should know that
you'll hear a mixture of sounds when you listen to French native speakers, as well as an occasional
alveolar rolled r.
At this point, we're basically done. The unvoiced plosives pas, ta cas are less aspirated than
their english siblings, PA TA KA, and the lateral alveolar /l/ is just alveolar - the
back of the tongue isn't raised, like our velarized alveolar l.
------------- To quickly review, we have
[All the vowels] and the four nasal vowels
the french schwa, /e/
for consonants, we have the uvular R, the palatal nasal, and the labialized palatal
approximant /y/ unvoiced plosives aren't strongly aspirated,
and /l/ isn't velarized.
In the next video, we'll talk about the spelling rules - how you go from what you read to what
you say. To practice these sounds, check out some of the resources in the video description
- you can find a ton of recordings at forvo.com, and have native speakers record your own texts
at Rhinospike. I'll be supplying an Anki deck soon and it'll be linked below when it's ready.
Subscribe above and until next time!