French Pronunciation and Learning French

Discussion in 'Learning Techniques and Advice' started by invictus, Aug 31, 2014.

  1. invictus

    invictus New Member

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    I took a few years of French in college that I've long since forgotten. All I really remember was that my accent was not the best. I imagine because we basically just studied from textbooks and my only examples were my fellow students and our non-native teacher.

    Anyway, I figured if I am to learn another language, French makes the most sense since it is the only one I have any sort of real background in. I guess I'd consider myself a false beginner.

    I am intrigued by this Assimil course. It looks rather interesting. It also is cheap, so I ordered it used on Amazon. It should arrive in a few days. I also ordered Essential French Grammar by Resnick because it is only 2 bucks and I've read that Assimil isn't the best with explaining grammar.

    A few questions for the forum:
    1. How much is too much when starting to study? Is just using Assimil with the passive and active wave and reading through Essential French Grammar a few times as I go enough?

    2. Any tips on how to improve pronunciation? I don't expect to sound native, but I don't want to hurt the ears of any Francophones nice enough to let me practice speaking with them!

    3. Any other supplementary material I should use? I don't mind spending money on good materials, but would be happy to stick with what I ordered and what the library has to start.

    My public library has what seems to be about 3 dozen random tourist phrase books, a bunch of old Teach Yourself books with no audio,a Berlitz Self-Teacher French book, Michel Thomas Foundation cds, a Cortina conversationl French in 20 Lessons book with no audio, a Cassell's contemporary French book, a couple of old beat up grammars, French for Reading by Karl Sandberg, and the Pimsleur French tapes.

    I really don't know what to think on Michel Thomas. Is it worth using? It seems to have a good reputation for grammar learning, though I don't know about the French course specifically. Would using it get in the way of my question #2?

    I've not read a ton of positive stuff about Pimsleur it seems. But will it really do wonders for my accent?

    Thanks for any input! I believe New French With Ease and the Resnick grammar book will arrive Tuesday! I'd like to have a set schedule for studying by then.
    Last edited: Aug 31, 2014
  2. Bjorn

    Bjorn Active Member VIP member

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    You can search YouTube for French pronunciation. There is a lot of videos.
  3. t123

    t123 New Member VIP member

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    Cainntear is the resident MT expert so maybe he'll chime in, but yes I'd recommend the MT Foundation and the Advanced if you can get it. For pronunciation you may be interested in the FSI Phonology course which is free as well their other French courses. You may also be interested in French in Action.
  4. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Yes - it's great for grammar, but don't follow his pronunciation tips…or at least take them with a grain of salt.
    Yes!
  5. garyb

    garyb Member

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    Accent is pretty important in French, and hard to get right! Pimsleur might help with pronuncation if you're the sort of person who has the talent of being able to accurately reproduce pronunciation from listening and repeating, but that doesn't work for everyone. Certainly not me; personally I need to actually know the "theory" behind how to make the sounds and how the prosody works, otherwise I'm just repeating based on the incorrect interpretation made by my incorrect mental model of the pronunciation and therefore developing bad habits. My accent was still horrible after all 3 Pimsleur units. There's more discussion about this in my pronunciation thread.

    Anyway, a few important things to bear in mind for French; maybe take it with a pinch of salt as my accent isn't good and probably never will be, but understanding all this helped me take it from bad to OK.

    Individual sounds, particularly vowels: learning the IPA sounds and how to produce them is incredibly useful. Some of the vowels (ou, u, eu, etc.) sound similar to the untrained ear but they're distinct sounds and you have to be able to identify and produce the differences between them, which requires understanding the positions (front/back, close/open, rounded/unrounded, etc.). Knowing IPA is also useful as it lets you easily check exactly how to pronounce any word in a dictionary, and while IPA can look scary, the subset of symbols that are used for French is small and can be learnt very quickly. It's also worth mentioning that most English speakers (Scots like myself excepted) pronounce "ay" sounds as two vowels (/ei/ in IPA), and similar for some other vowels, which is something to be avoided in French words like "café" in which the "é" is a single vowel.

    Prosody: French has an even syllable-timed rhythm and individual words don't have stress, unlike English in which stressed syllables are given more time. Sentences are essentially divided into "syllable groups", which often comprise several words, and there's a slight stress and intonation on the last syllable of the group. And it's important to make sure every vowel is pronounced fully; in English we "reduce" unstressed vowels, so the "a" in "about" for example is pronounced more like "uh" as opposed to a full "ah" sound. Make sure you don't do this in French!

    The FSI Phonology course is decent and of course free, and covers a lot of what I've mentioned above. I also found La prononciation française pour de vrai useful; it's a DVD set of lectures that explain the prosody and individual sounds in quite a lot of detail. It's probably overkill for a lot of people, but for someone as hopeless at pronunciation as myself there's no such thing as too much detail.
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  6. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    One should study pronunciation at three different levels. The individual sound, word, and sentence levels. Pimsleur is great for the sentence level. Here is my thread on language learning which contains general information about pronunciation, and a more specific pronunciation thread.
  7. Bob

    Bob Active Member VIP member

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    I liked the rules in pronounce it perfectly in french although I never went through it systematically. Also I find that Pimsleur is good for pronunciation only if you have some idea of what's already going on. I doubt I would have picked up on Mandarin tones with just that.
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  8. garyb

    garyb Member

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    I agree. I think it would be great for hearing and putting into practice the theory you've already learned, since it has so much repetition. My lack of pronunciation success with Pimsleur was because I didn't know what to listen for and imitate. If I had worked through it after learning the theory about sounds and prosody etc. in my previous post, it might well have been more fruitful.

    I've never looked at Pronounce it Perfectly in French but I've heard good things. There's also a course called "D'accord" that's supposed to be good for pronunciation, which I've seen mentioned on HTLAL, but again I've never looked at it. If I ever start learning French again I'll probably check both out.
  9. Olivier

    Olivier New Member

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    Hello, Guys.

    Big-Dog, you succeeded ! I am going to post ...

    Firstly, I am not going to give you commercial solutions to improve your French pronunciation.
    As you probably understood, I am not a English native speaker, I am French.

    Secondly, I am surprised that English native speaker have difficulties with our pronunciation because yours is more complicated, detailed, etc.
    In fact, you have to be lazy. Our pronunciation is "flat" without any accentuation. There are just few traps : u/ou ; non-pronounced letters ...

    You can certainly find very good books and methods but your presence on the site prove your ability to use the Internet.
    We are numerous native French speakers who want exchange in French and English, it is often more friendly.
    Do not be afraid about the origin or the accent of your correspondent, only vocabulary changes between a French, a Belgian, etc.
    We share the same pronunciation, the same music, the same rhythm.

    On my side, I learn English with two teachers; two friends (Thanks a lot Big-Dog !); a dictionary and a software of phonetic translation.
    I use books when I do not have choice !

    Try to find a native French correspondent ...

    Sorry for the mistakes ! Sinon la prochaine fois, j'écris en français !
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  10. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Lol - my plan succeeded! Good to have you here, and nice post.
  11. luke

    luke Member VIP member

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  12. garyb

    garyb Member

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    I agree in principle that French pronunciation is a lot simpler than English, especially when it comes to prosody: simple syllable-timed rhythm, not much intonation, no lexical stress, etc. I think the problems are awareness and habit.

    Much like the u/ou distinction, most people won't know that they should listen for, and try to duplicate, a syllable-timed rhythm or a certain intonation pattern unless they're actually aware of it in the first place. If someone's speaking French with an English-like rhythm, it's probably because they don't know that they shouldn't speak French with an English-like rhythm and they don't know what makes French's rhythm distinct. And once you do become aware of the differences, applying them to your own speech isn't easy when you've been used to speaking a certain way all your life, and it takes a lot of conscious effort even if the new way of speaking is technically simpler.
  13. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Meant to chip in on this ages ago, sorry.

    I used the MT French course very late on in my French learning. It really helped me get the grammar sorted out, but of all the courses that Thomas himself made, it's my least favourite. In terms of pronunciation, he does put a lot of focus on the difference between U and OU, which a lot of courses don't, but then he made the decision to ignore the difference between sounds, telling you to reduce le and la to just l, and it's pretty difficult to see why.

    So I'm in two minds about whether it's really suitable as a first course or not....
  14. tastyonions

    tastyonions Member VIP member

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    Check out these videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/frenchsounds/videos

    She focuses mostly on vowels, which is where English speakers usually mess up the most and where the greatest potential for confusion lies -- even if you pronounce "r", "l", and other consonants in a totally Anglophone way, people will still understand you, but if your vowels take on the mushy, diphthongy character of English ones, or if you simply don't make the sounds of "u" or "eu" and substitute other ones, you'll probably have more trouble.

    In my experience Francophones especially appreciate when Anglophones get the "r" and the "ou/u" distinction right.
    Yikes, that's pretty bad...
  15. invictus

    invictus New Member

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    I ordered the third edition of Pronounce it Perfectly in French! Hard to beat such a cheap price on Amazon for something new.

    After playing with Assimil a bit, I'm not sure I like it as my first full course. I think I might get more out of it a few months down the road as just a graded bilingual reader after getting a more solid grammatical grounding elsewhere. Does that seem reasonable?

    I ordered the Hugo Complete French course since it was only $30 and seems pretty good from the reviews I've read. I'm unsure how much audio comes with the course, but I think a decent amount? I'd like to work through that and then revisit Assimil as a vocabulary builder/idiom familiarizer after.

    I'm thinking I'll just do the pronunciation course over this long weekend, dive into Hugo when it arrives (hopefully sometime next week.... I went cheap on shipping), and maybe try working through short news articles I'm French a few times a week and see how it goes. Do the more experienced language learners here think this all seems doable and like a reasonable way to kick things off? I'd also be glad to hear anyone's thoughts on Hugo and any "tweaks" to using it like how there seem to be so many for Assimil. Or is it set up in a straight forward way to use as is right from the box?

    From the last few comments, I'm unsure if Michel Thomas would be a good idea anytime soon. Is it fair to skip Michel Thomas for now since Hugo apparently gives a good grounding in grammar and just revisit the idea of MT later on?

    I imagine that if all goes well, learning and enjoying French will be a lifelong endeavor, so I'm in no rush :) I just want to put myself in a position to get a good grounding while I work to transition to native materials.

    Oh, and I'll be sure to add reviews to the review page as I complete courses so I can start helping to give back to the community.

    Thank you to anyone who cares to chime in.
  16. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Sounds good to me - especially the part about doing the pronunciation course right away. If I had to do it all over again, I'd pay a lot more attention to the liaison than I did. Now I have issues and won't be able to fix them until I have enough time. I'm not sure how much help your pronunciation course will be in that regard, but staying on top of it as you learn is a good idea.
  17. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

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    The vowel distinctions are important or it can be difficult to exactly understand, but the "r" doesn't make difficult, only with the "r" it seems very English, the other foreigners don't prnounce the "r" similarly to the very obvious English version. The English accent sound nice, I like it.
  18. luke

    luke Member VIP member

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    Your profile says you are native French. Where did you grow up? I'm imagining French Canadians are more forgiving that the French when it comes to accent.
  19. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

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    I'm belgian.

    I lived in Wallonia all my life until this summer and now I live in London because my dad has work here now therefore my parents moved and I am with them.
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  20. invictus

    invictus New Member

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    Sad news. My Hugo course never arrived. It said it was delivered this past Tuesday, but the only box outside my door was something unrelated. I don't think anyone stole it since any decent thief would steal both packages, right? Anyway, I went to the post office and the carrier just said "I don't know....if it says delivered, I am sure I did it."

    The seller was 3rd party on Amazon. Looks like I am out of luck. No course and no refund.

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