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How long to read French aloud correctly? | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 1 of 29 12 March 2013 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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My question really is:
How long did it take you to be able to read something in French and know you were pronouncing it basically correct? (within the limits of your own accent). With English, it can take a reader a long time to know how to pronounce what they are reading correctly. Even after many years, one may see a new word, and although one can guess how it is pronounced, one can't be sure, as the same letters may be pronounced many different ways, and where the accent in a word falls doesn't follow a hard and fast rule. For instance, one can see the words rough, cuff, though, tow, through, dew, cough, off, plough, now, fought, taut, taught, and not necessarily know the sound relationship between all of the words. So is French as irregular as English in this regard, or is it a bit closer to Spanish in pronunciation rules? (though I know it isn't that straight forward). Or, God forbid, is French worse than English? Edited by luke on 12 March 2013 at 10:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4638 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 2 of 29 12 March 2013 at 11:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think French is more straightforward than English because all of their sounds and writing usually match up. For instance, you know "rouille" and "trouille" (might be a bad example, but still) both have the same ending sound, but "tough" and "plough" don't have the same ending sound, although are written the same. Once you get the sounds matched up to their spelling, I'm pretty sure you have it down.
Native speakers, please correct me. Edited by sillygoose1 on 12 March 2013 at 11:03pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4846 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 3 of 29 13 March 2013 at 9:15am | IP Logged | ||
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French is much more straightforward than English. There are a few exceptions where the pronunciation of a word is not predictable (e.g. "femme"), but the greatest part of words follows some very straightforward rules. French pronunciation is not half as difficult as it may look like in the beginning. Edited by Josquin on 13 March 2013 at 9:24am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 4 of 29 13 March 2013 at 10:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Didn't take me more than a couple weeks, some oddball pronunciations with silent letters
excepted. But you'll run into that in any language I guess. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6087 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 29 13 March 2013 at 10:24am | IP Logged | ||
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The problem is not so much the words themselves but the way they string sounds together which makes reading without audio very hard for me.
petite amie ---) peti tami Il habite à Paris ---) il abi tapari This might be interesting for those wanting to train themselves to recognize enchaînements consonantiques et vocaliques. It's definitely worth a peek! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4667 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 6 of 29 13 March 2013 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
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As mentioned, "emme" is a little confusing. It's /am/ in "femme" and "récemment" but nasalized in "emmener" and then "lemme" is /lɛm/.
There are a few other things that confused me, for example, why is "descendre" pronounced like "déscendre" even though it has no accent mark? Anyway, just getting the sounds out more or less correctly is not all that difficult, but making it all flow smoothly together is something else, and I'm still working on that. Edited by tastyonions on 13 March 2013 at 11:24am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5102 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 7 of 29 13 March 2013 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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French is definitely more consistent than English, but isn't every language?
How long it takes will depend upon how much time you invest in it. If you read books with the audio version playing, you will probably have an advantage. There will probably always be a few words that, for no apparent reason, must have the final consonant pronounced or something like that which throw you for a bit of a loop. In my personal experience: I think it took about a year to a year and a half, but can't be completely sure since I don't often read out loud to native French speakers. Edited by Darklight1216 on 13 March 2013 at 12:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 8 of 29 13 March 2013 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | ||
That's a very helpful link. Thank you! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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