Is your child in a French Immersion class?

I’ll bet that sometimes you wonder why you enrolled them:

• Do you feel left out and sometimes don’t understand what your child is saying?

• If they are having difficulty you may think: ‘How can I help my child? I’m in no position to do so.’

The good news is…

Your child is certainly becoming bilingual. Did you realize that you can piggy-back on your child’s French education (for free!) and become bilingual too?

How can you do that?...

First you have to acknowledge that you won’t speak fluent French overnight, but over time you can and will.

By having a child in French Immersion, you have 24x7 access to a French speaker. When children learn they don’t try to understand pronunciation like adults do, they just repeat accurately what the teacher says. As an adult, you need to know why a string of letters is pronounced in a way that doesn’t make sense to you. This is why I created my PDF Introduction to French Pronunciation (see posts below).

Once you understand French pronunciation mechanics, you’ll feel happier and more confident, and your child will sense it and benefit from it. Then, your focus can shift to learning new vocabulary words and phrases and before you know it you’ll be pretty good in French!

The French language’s rhythm

Last week I showed you how to separate French words into syllables.  This week we will see how syllables are used to mark rhythm in French.

In French we pronounce each syllable with the same weight, or length if you prefer, except for the last one, which is slightly longer, but only a tiny bit longer.  Which last syllable, I hear you thinking? That would be the last syllable of a word pronounced on its own or the last syllable of a group of words representing a single thought/idea. For example:

le chapeau	le cha-peau
le chapeau noir	le cha-peau noir
Le chapeau noir est beau.	Le cha-peau noir / est beau.

On its own, le chapeau (the hat), has its last syllable peau pronounced slightly longer.

Le chapeau noir (the black hat) is a complete idea; le and noir do belong with chapeau, so noir is the last syllable in the group and is pronounced a bit longer.

In the final example, a new group is introduced: est beau (is nice).  This is the group relating to the verb (the action word); the word is on its own dangles, the reader/listener thinks is what? (Is nice, in this case.)  In this group the last syllable beau is pronounced slightly longer.

Granted, these examples are simple, but simple is always a good starting point.

Can you begin to see (or hear) how some people say that French sounds musical?  It is because of all these slightly longer syllables here and there in an otherwise steady stream of sounds!

How to separate French words into syllables

Sounds make up syllables, syllables make up words, and words make up sentences.

Not understanding the mechanics of the French syllable undermines your ability to pronounce French words correctly and to communicate. Why? Syllables do make up words! Without knowing how to separate French syllables your pronunciation could be unrecognisable by both, French and English speakers.

Take the word spaghetti, as a Francophone having lived so many years in Anglophones cities, I really never mastered its English pronunciation; most of the time I pronounce it spa-ghet-ti (the French way). If I say this word in English inevitably the Anglophone person’s face to whom I’m speaking to will go blank and he/she will say after a while: “You mean spaghetti?” (without any syllable separation; or so it seems to me!)

To help you learn how to separate French words into syllables I have prepared this document:

Different word pronunciations

How do you pronounce the word les in French?

The, in French translate into le (for a masculine noun – le garçon), la (for a feminine noun – la fille) and les (for plural nouns – les enfants (no matter the gender.)

I pronounce les like the word \let\ in English (but without the t). You may come across people who will pronounce it \lay\. I have seen the IPA transcription written both ways in different French dictionaries. I suspect that the pronunciation \lay\ is more common in France than it is in Québec, but I could be wrong.

Online last week, I came across in interesting thread about the pronunciation of word ending in il, like fusil (gun), baril (barrel), and persil (parsley). I never pronounced the l, but found out that people have been pronouncing it both ways (pronouncing the l and not pronouncing it). The amazing thing (to me) was both pronunciations were in used in Québec and in France.

When you suspect that people are pronouncing a particular word differently to what you know, check your dictionary, survey French speaking people around you to see which way they pronounce it and go with the majority.

Ask me a question

If you wish to ask me a question, click on comments below this post and leave a question instead of a comment; you can also write to me at mail@frenchpronunciationandmore.com.