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Is this a good for French pronunciation? | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| banyon Newbie United States Joined 6863 days ago 10 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 16 22 August 2012 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm starting the process of learning French, and I'd like to master the sounds first. I'd also like to be perceived as
accentless. As far as I can tell, this means I should learn the kind of French that doesn't really have a name, but is spoken on French television and occasionally called Metropolitan French or the Persian Accent. I'm making an Anki deck with the IPA symbols representing each phoneme used in French. I've found a few recordings online, but I can't tell which ones are standard French and which aren't. Would any natives be able to tell me which of these (if any) are Standard French? 1. http://phonetique.free.fr/alpha/voy.htm 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=nhH51nv8k1Y&feature=related 3. http://www.french.hku.hk/starters/fonetik/fiche 02web.htm 4. http://www.phonetique.ulaval.ca/illust.html 5. http://flenet.unileon.es/courstourdumonde /phonetique.htm#son Edited by Fasulye on 28 August 2012 at 7:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5426 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 2 of 16 22 August 2012 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Especially for any material that's designed to give you a pronunciation key, you
shouldn't worry about accent. Unless the material is specifically designed to initiate you to say, le francais du Quebec, or to west african french or something. Besides which, pronunciation isn't the same as accent. But to answer your question, besides the first and last links, which for whatever reason I couldn't open on my browser, all the words spoken sound pretty 'vanilla french' 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 16 22 August 2012 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For a native speaker of American English, pay particular attention to the following
sounds in French: - The rounded front vowels: /y/, /ø/ and /œ/. - The nasal vowels: /ɛ̃/, /ɔ̃/ and /ɑ̃/. Some regions of France also have /œ̃/, but many native speakers merge it with /ɛ̃/. - The French "R". If you don't know what these symbols mean, see: Interactive IPA charts If you can make all of these sounds, you should be in pretty good shape. Also pay very close attention to pitch and rhythm. If your overall intonation is right, it makes a huge difference. There's also a few other things worth working on at some point, like the French "t", which doesn't have the distinctive puff of air you hear in the English "t". (Put your hand in front of your mouth and make the sounds "t" and "d". You notice how the first one has a puff, and the second one doesn't? Neither sound has a puff in French.) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| banyon Newbie United States Joined 6863 days ago 10 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 16 23 August 2012 at 4:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry about the first link. The correct one is below. When you say vanilla French I just want to make sure we're on
the same page. Take English. I can tell pretty easily if someone's speaking General American or one of hundreds of variations. RP or any of the Southern U.S. dialects are obvious, but even people who try to neutralize their accents give themselves away on occasion (Stephen Colbert for instance). I suspect it's not possible to avoid some of this, but I'd want to make sure the recordings I'm working with are as close to neutral as possible. Is there anything at all non-standard with the pronunciations here? Even things as small as the French equivalent of failing to stress the r- colored vowel in turkey. All I can go on now is guesses. For example, one of the links has a Canadian country code and one has a Spanish one. These lead me to guess they're not Standard French. http://phonetique.free.fr/indexphonvoy.htm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 16 23 August 2012 at 5:32am | IP Logged | |||||
To my non-native ears, there's some very slightly weird stress in (2), because he's trying to emphasize the vowels. The example from Canada appears to be standard French, without the clockwise nasal vowel shift or dipthongs that you typically get in a heavy Quebec accent. More to the point, you probably don't want to spend too much time worrying about precise vowel color in isolated pronunciation examples. Even scrupulously "standard" French has some minor differences that are equivalent to the "cot / caught" merger in some dialects of North American English. Here are some good tests to make sure you're on the right page: 1. "Un bon enfant" should contain either 3 or 4 nasal vowels. If the first and third match, that's not a problem—lots of native speakers are like that. 2. "Tu" and "tout" should sound different. 3. "Sont", "cent" and "cinq" should all sound different, even when "cinq" is pronounced without the "q". 4. "Cou", "queue" and "cul" (not polite) should all sound different. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| banyon Newbie United States Joined 6863 days ago 10 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 16 23 August 2012 at 6:55am | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you so much!! Did you have any opinion on the first one I reposted the link for? At the top of the page it will say "Présentation des voyelles" which leads to a big flash presentation with all the sounds. To me, these sound the best--which admittedly doesn't mean a whole lot. This is the link I mean btw, http://phonetique.free.fr/indexphonvoy.htm Edited by banyon on 23 August 2012 at 6:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 7 of 16 23 August 2012 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Phonemes are not all the sounds there are in a language, if you want to speak with no accent, learning just the phonemes is not enough. Learn to immitate the sound of whole words and phrases instead. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| banyon Newbie United States Joined 6863 days ago 10 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 16 23 August 2012 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree completely, but I have to start somewhere. As soon as I'm done with these I'll move on to practicing with recordings of full words and sentences, then vocab, then grammar, then immersion. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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