How to Pronounce Words in French | Lesson 2

Today's goal is for you to understand the pronunciation of the French language. We're not going to do the alphabet. What we're going to do are 36 phonemes. Phonemes are simply sounds that are found in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and they represent sounds as they are spoken. But why you need to know about phonemes is so that if you look in a dictionary, everybody's looked into a dictionary to try to figure out how to pronounce the word, and these symbols will enable you to do that. They are descriptive. They are actually how people speak. Now, you have to remember the French language has been spoken, actually, as an official language in 29 different countries, and it's spoken in some 80 different countries, actually, all over the world, but it's official language in 29. And you're going to get variations in pronunciation. Just like in the United States, if you go to Boston, the pronunciation is going to be completely different than if you go to Atlanta, Georgia. But our goal is that you be able to speak, you be able to pronounce French in a French way, and you don't sound like an English speaker, but you sound like a French person from somewhere. Let's get started and take a look. The first thing we're going to do is the vowels. Now, if you look in parentheses, there's a symbol, and that I is actually pronounced ee. The French ee is a very tight ee. It doesn't have a glide. It's not ee. It's ee. And if you look at the sentence real carefully, it would be Lily ira à Paris jeudi. Ee. We find that ee sound in the numbers dix and six, and it's a very common sound. Again, it's very tight. Your lips are going to be kind of drawn back. Your tongue is going to be in the front. So let's try it one more time. The next sound we're going to learn is eh. This is called a closed ee. It's sound is eh. Let's listen to it. The sound again is eh, and it's a closed ee, and it's represented what looks like an English or a regular alphabet ee in brackets. The next sound that we're going to deal with is an open ee. It's open because your mouth is going to come open. Okay, and it's an eh. So not eh, but eh. We also find it in a sentence. Now, the next sound that we're going to deal with is an eh sound, but there's a lot of discussion about ehs in French because where I learned French, there were two ehs, but if you go to... I learned French in Canada, but if you go to Europe, some people say there's only one eh. I disagree. I think there are two, and I'm going to teach you both, but don't get upset if you don't hear this sound of eh as often as you hear ah. Listen to the difference. This is an eh sound. Now, this is a hard sound for English speakers to make. It's found in German, but it's not found in the English language, and it's really kind of easy to make if you think about it for a second. We had the first phoneme that represented the sound ih. Now, if you look at my lips when I say ih, my lips are tight in back, and all I have to do is move my lips forward, kind of round, and it becomes ih. So try ih, then just move your lips forward, ih. The next sound we're going to deal with is an eh-kuh-dook. It's a natural ih. You really don't hear this one very much. It's an eh sound. It's a round sound, okay? It looks round if you look at it, okay? So your lips are going to be rounded, and listen carefully. Very similar to eh, except you open your mouth more. So the eh sound is rounded. In this, you open your mouth a little bit. Always sounds like an ape swinging through the trees, okay? Because it's an uh sound. It's not oh like in English. It's oh. Kind of puff it out a little bit. Sounds like this. It's all one big phonetic word, but the sound is oh. It's not the oh sound. It's an uh sound. Listen again. This is our second eh. The first one was an eh sound, and this is an ah sound. Then we're going to deal with a classification of vowels These are the fun ones, because they really don't come out of your nose, but they're called nasalized vowels. First one is ah. It's rounded. Ah is pronounced as ah by most French speakers in France, including Paris, but not in Canada. You hear a distinct ah sound in Canada. Then we have semi-vowels or semi-consonants of the same thing. The first one is a yuh sound. And the last is a wuh sound. Now we're going to move to consonants, and the consonants are very, very much like the consonants in the English language. In order to pronounce them well, we're going to put an e sound on the end of it so that you can hear them correctly. The first would be a p, which is puh, and it sounds like this. It comes out of your mouth kind of as a puff. Not t sound. Here it's kind of sound out. Sounds a lot like our m sound. Nuh. It has a yuh sound to it. The r sound in French comes from the back of your throat, and it's real easy to make. What you take the English word air, and then just don't move your tongue. What I hope we learned today is that the sounds in the French language are not identical to the sounds in the English language by any means, but there are only 36 of those sounds. And how we combine them to make sentences is going to be the subject of future lessons, because these are the phonemes, the individual sounds. What we're going to learn to do is to join them together to make phonetic sentences and rhythmical groups so that people will be able to understand you. Because if you can't pronounce a word correctly, you've lost the person you're talking with immediately. So work hard on pronunciation. And if you don't know how to pronounce a word when you sight read it, when you take a look at it, look in a dictionary and apply the phonemes that we looked over today to the words you find in the dictionary, and your pronunciation should be good.