How Can I Improve my Pronunciation in General? This all relates back to you speaking French in several ways: if you ultimately want to sound like a native and you produce all of the sounds correctly then maybe the problem is how you combine the sounds, which words you choose to speak with, or the word order you use to express yourself. Many factors ranging from syntax (the order in which we put out words) to lexical semantics (the words we choose to express ourselves) can play a role.Īlthough considered a dialect, if you take the case of Southerners from the U.S who say hi like “haai” (pronunciation) and use y’all to represent you guys in Standard English (word choice) then combined these factors all tell us English speakers where they’re from.
This tenseness plays into another factor of French: French vowels are not diphthongs, they are clean vowels. When saying words like vie or riz, pull your mouth all the way apart and really emphasize that tension. French is marked by increase tenseness with the muscles around your mouth.
The easiest way to obtain proper intonation is through more exposure with the language because I could write an entire article on French intonation alone. Intonation in French is slightly different than English.Have you ever noticed that French speakers sound almost like they’re singing when they talk? French words meld and flow in a fluid pattern (thanks to many liaisons).What I want to stress is that your French pronunciation can get improve with hard word and a little effort! Alright? Let’s get started! Some Factors to French Pronunciation and Foreign Accents
First we’ll talk about phonemes (sounds) you’ll need to adjust followed by a snippet at the end discussing how you can improve your pronunciation overall. To try to help my fellow French learners, I have crafted this article to give you the tools to analyze and fix your French pronunciation. Let’s not forget that when you think you’ve found a rule to explain something in French pronunciation then it is usually riddled with exceptions (for example when to pronounce the final consonant in a word). French is laced with liaisons, silent letters, and a variety of sounds that do not exist in English. How can I improve my French pronunciation and lose my pesky accent? Well to explain this question, we would need to understand that a foreign accent results from not fully adapting to another language’s set of phonological and phonetic rules. To make matters worse, we have a tendency to use our first language’s pronunciation rules while processing our second language, this is especially true for beginners.įrench is often rated among the world’s sexiest languages yet, the same traits that make French prose so eloquent and beautiful are land mines for us language learners.