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Although you never aspirate (pronounce) the h in French, the definitive work on the French language, Le bon usage from Maurice Grévisse, lists 189 words with an h aspiré. With these 189 words you cannot use elision or make liaison. For example, the word hibou (owl) is a masculine noun; you can say le hibou, but not l’hibou and you cannot make liaison between les and hiboux (les (z)hiboux). For more details about elision and liaison, please review pages 13-16 in my PDF Introduction to French pronunciation.
I have listed the most frequent words with an h aspiré in the following document: The H aspiré
It is time for me to post Part 2 of my PDF:
Introduction to French Pronunciation (parts 1 and 2)
Part 1 (pages 1-7) is included for those of you who are new to my blog. For those coming back for Part 2, you’ll now have the two parts in one document (and will only need to print from page 8 onwards).
It is difficult to write an introduction to French pronunciation without boring you to death; still, concepts need to be explained and I’ve tried to keep Elision and Liaison brief.
Little by little, I’ll add more info to this blog (Rome was not built in a day and you won’t become fluent in French overnight!). This will help you better than racing through concepts that you would struggle to properly assimilate, if I gave them to you too quickly – ‘slow and steady wins the race’.
When it comes to speaking another language, knowing the right pronunciation is important to me. Some people like to learn pre-fabricated French sentences by heart and repeat them. My mind is more inquisitive; I like to know the why’s and how’s – that way I feel more confident. So when I learned in my French linguistic classes that there were only 37 sounds in French and that the majority of these sounds were used in English, I thought that Anglophones would not find French so difficult if they knew that.
To get you (and me) started with French pronunciation, here is a downloadable PDF file: Introduction to French Pronunciation
(This is Part 1; Part 2 will be posted in a couple of weeks.)
This PDF has been written with parents of French Immersion children in mind.
As a parent your child comes home with new words and pronounces them the way the teacher taught them to in class. You scratch your head when you see the written form of the new words and are tempted to correct your child. Hopefully this PDF will help you decipher pronunciation of French words and understand why your child pronounces them the way he/she does.
If you are not a parent of French Immersion children, but are learning French, please do have a look at the PDF. If you do not have a French speaking person to practice with, the next best thing to help you hear words as they should sound is this cool website that will pronounce text you type in French (with a choice of male and female voices with different accents): http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php?sitepal
Note: If you wish to print the PDF please do so but be aware that it should be printed in color for the best usability of the document, since most of the pronunciation emphasis is indicated through use of different colors.
Although you never aspirate (pronounce) the h in French, the definitive work on the French language, Le bon usage from Maurice Grévisse, lists 189 words with an h aspiré. With these 189 words you cannot use elision or make liaison. For example, the word hibou (owl) is a masculine noun; you can say le hibou, but not l’hibou and you cannot make liaison between les and hiboux (les (z)hiboux). For more details about elision and liaison, please review pages 13-16 in my PDF Introduction to French pronunciation.
