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How to pronounce the French article "un"?

  Tags: Pronunciation | French
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
11 messages over 2 pages: 1
Arekkusu
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Canada
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Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto
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 Message 9 of 11
03 October 2011 at 3:49pm | IP Logged 
If you're going for [œ̃] (Standard, still in use in Canada), then take the vowel from je and make it nasal (by allowing air to go through your nasal passage, without changing your mouth position in any way). This assumes you know how to say "je".

If you're going for [ɛ̃] (most common in Europe), then take the vowel from fait and make it nasal. Now this also assumes you know how to make a proper è sound...

It's hard to explain it any better in writing.

Edited by Arekkusu on 03 October 2011 at 3:49pm

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Spiderkat
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United States
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Studies: Russian

 
 Message 10 of 11
03 October 2011 at 7:59pm | IP Logged 
Remster wrote:
Most words in French don't pronounce the last letter. The same goes for ''un''.
As the people above me said, it comes from the nose. An ''U"' from the nose, and try to exhale some breath from your mouth when you do it. You'll feel some slight vibrations in your nose.

The word UN is a word and a sound itself. If you take the N off the word UN then you simply have a plain U which is not a nasal sound. The letter U doesn't sound like the word UN at all.
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songlines
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Canada
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 Message 11 of 11
03 October 2011 at 8:33pm | IP Logged 
You can hear a number of entries/pronunciations in Forvo:http://www.forvo.com/search/un/fr/.

A very useful site. One thing I like about it is that you can (depending on the responses) get a range of pronunciations and accents, and thereby get a sense of how different regions might pronounce the same word. (A note tells you where the speaker is from.) Or, if a particular speaker isn't very clear or if he/she has personal idiosyncracies in speech, you might well be able to listen to someone else say the word or phrase.

Forvo bills itself as having 279 languages, so it's not just for French. Mind you, some of the "smaller" languages may have very few words and pronunciations. But still...

Edited by songlines on 03 October 2011 at 10:22pm



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