Today I’m going to show you how to look at words in French, even words that you have never seen before, and say them properly the first time, every time.
First, stop focusing on entire words before attempting to say them. Instead, look at each word as a series of “syllables” or blocks of letters that are linked together to give you a word.
The syllables are only sounds. Forget the words and listen for the sounds!
If you can reproduce the sound, even if you don’t know how to write it, you will be able to successfully pronounce the word.
Look at this example:
Le gouvernement du Canada
You probably recognize this as “The government of Canada”. Now let’s take this expression apart. First, some basic concepts about French words:
1. You must finish a syllable on a harsh consonant sound.
2. Syllables may start with a consonant.
3. Double consonants are generally split.
4. The last syllable of a word ALWAYS gets the “stress” or the emphasis in French.
So, if we dissect the above expression, it looks like this:
Le (1) gou (2) ver (3) ne (4) ment (5) du (6) Ca (7) na (8) da (9)
Here is the analysis:
- this starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel
- starts with a consonant and ends with the vowel sound “ou”
- starts with a consonant and ends with a consonant……….
This does not compute! Have I misled you?
In this case, you MUST drop your jaw to its fullest extension before saying the consonant. This will serve to soften the sound of the consonant into a vowel sound. Where’s your tongue?
Look ahead to syllable 4 and you will notice that we split the two consonants.
4 – is OK
5 – Starts with a consonant and ends with a consonant.
What do we do? Drop the jaw.
Also, as a rule, we NEVER pronounce a consonant at the end of a word UNLESS the consonant is followed by an “e”. In this case, the “t” in “gouvernement” does not enter into the pronunciation.
6 – is Ok
7 – is OK
8 – is OK
9 – is OK
Let’s look at my version of phonetics so we know how the syllables are supposed to sound
LE GOO VAI*R NE [ME*N] DU CA NA [DA]
The following vowels must be pronounced the French way:
Le Ne Ca Na .
The other syllables are English sounds. The ” * ” means you MUST drop your jaw. For example, to say ” VAIR ” in English, you must raise your tongue to the curled up position.
If you keep your tongue down, the ” R ” becomes almost non-existent. The ” R ” is your enemy sound in French.
The syllables surrounded by parentheses […] indicate where you must put the stress in that word. This makes French pronunciation much easier than English for this simple reason.
For fun, let’s look at the English phonetics so you can see the difference between the two languages.
The [GOV] vern mint of [CAN] nad da
Did you notice that English tends to double consonants in order to produce an easy flow to the language?
If you have any questions, you can email me anytime at robert@rebelfrench.com.
Aurevoir et à la prochaine……..
Robert