-Today we're going to take a look at the different French accents
and specifically how to pronounce words that have accent marks.
I'm your host Danae, and in this video
our teacher Mikayla is going to share with you a helpful grammar lesson for beginners.
So stay tuned, and be sure to click the link in the description box below
to check out one of our free online French classes.
-Hi everyone. My name is Mikayla, here at TakeLessons.
I'm here to talk to you about accents in French.
Let's start with the letter E.
So the letter E in French is pronounced uh
and this uh is going to change when we put different accents onto it.
So the first accent we're going to put onto it is the accent aigu.
The accent aigu is the tick mark that goes up.
And this accent is going to change that uh sound to the sound eh.
So you really want to make sure you smile as you say it almost
and it's a sound that's going to resonate up in your cheeks, eh.
The second accent that we have on the E is the accent grave.
And that's our tick mark that's going down.
Now, this accent is never going to happen at the beginning of a word.
It's always going to be in the middle or at the end.
This changes that E sound which is normally uh into eh.
So these are the examples for a normal uh sound.
Je, Me, Te. If we add the accent aigu
so the tick mark going up, it's going to become Jé, Mé, Té.
And if we add the accent grave
which is the tick mark going down, we say Jè, Mè, Tè.
So some words that have the accent aigu would be words like fatigué or parlé.
Some words that have the accent grave are très, après.
The accent grave can also work on other vowels like A or U
but they don't change anything about how the word is said.
What they're doing instead is distinguishing that word
from another word that is spelled exactly the same.
Some examples of this are the words ou and où.
The ou without the accent means "or"
and the où with the accent means "where."
Or with the examples La and Là.
La without the accent means "the"
and "là" with the accent means "there."
The next accent that we have is the accent circonflexe.
Our accent circonflexe is a little hat that goes over the different vowels.
Now this one doesn't really change anything about the way a word is pronounced.
What it is, is actually a historical marker.
So in old French we had extra letters.
But when they went to re-modify how we speak the language and
how we write the language
they took those letters out and they put this little accent instead
to say, "Hey, normally there is a letter here."
Some examples of that are the old French Hostel which then became Hôtel
and Hospital which became Hôpital.
The next accent that we have is what we call le tréma
and these are the two little dots that go over a vowel.
What this does is
this is when we have two vowels that are next to each other
and instead of pronouncing them together, we pronounce them apart.
We make them two different syllables.
Some examples are the words Noël.
Noël, Christmas.
We wouldn't say "NOL", we're going to say "NO EL".
Another example: Naïf, which means naive.
We're not saying "NAIF." "NA IF."
The last accent that we have is called the "C cédille".
The "C cédille" is going to be only under letter C.
This is our little tail that goes underneath it.
This is because normally in French, CA, CO and CU are pronounced CA, CO, CU.
These are the hard C sounds.
But in certain cases we want a soft C before an A, an O or a U.
Then we add that "C cédille" and it makes it a /S/ sound.
Instead of saying CA, CO, CU, we say ÇA, ÇO, ÇU.
Some examples of this we can see in the words: Ça va!
There are of course many words that have multiple accents.
A lot of times it has to do with the accent aigu.
At the end of words there's going to be lots of É sounds.
But there are many other words like Théâtre
which has an accent aigu and then an accent circonflexe.
-Hey guys. Thanks for watching.
Which of the French accent marks gives you the most trouble?
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