2025-11-21
15 分钟Today I want to talk about French pronunciation and in particular the pronunciation of French vowels,
which I think is a key to speaking French in a way that's comfortable and pleasing to the native speaker.
I think pronunciation generally is another example of the sort of 80-20 approach that I take in all language learning.
In other words, 20% of the effort should be on the details and the specifics, the nuts and bolts,
and 80% at least of your effort should be spent on holistically absorbing the usage patterns,
absorbing the pronunciation system of the language.
Now, it is true that in French,
many people identify specific aspects of pronunciation that they find difficult,
like the guttural R or the U sound.
And we'll get into those, or for that matter, nasal vowels.
and I'm going to touch on those specifics but rather I'm going to encourage you to find a way to develop a feel for the language so that the whole call it phonology,
the sound system of the French language becomes natural to you.
Now any pronunciation system is a collection of patterns just like the language itself and this collection of patterns can be different for different regions so some of the things that I'll say about French
as it's spoken say in France or in northern France will be different from how French is spoken in Quebec just as the way English is spoken in Scotland is not the same as how it is spoken in Australia So as with everything in language learning you need to spend a lot of time listening particularly listening and reading making that connection between how the language is written and how it's pronounced relying on what you hear not relying on how Letters are used in your own language.
I personally don't like to rely on the IPA, which is not the beer,
by the way, Indian Pale Ale, but rather the International Phonetic Alphabet,
because pronunciation varies from different parts of the world, as I said earlier,
and so any attempt to tie a sound to a specific symbol is not as useful as putting in a lot of time listening.
That's not to say that you shouldn't use the IPA if you like using it.
I don't use it for any language.