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French vs Italian ease of pronounciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| mr_chinnery Senior Member England Joined 5758 days ago 202 posts - 297 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 18 05 January 2011 at 2:44am | IP Logged | ||
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What do other native English speakers who are learning these languages make of the
comparative difficulty of pronouncing them? I find some Italian pronunciations really hard, like 'Dollari'...my tongue just doesn't handle the different shapes for the l and r well in quick succession! With Italian the mouth seems to be open alot more, with the tongue doing most of the hard work, whereas French seems to pronounce much more easily. Is it just me or is this a common thing with English speakers? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 2 of 18 05 January 2011 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||
It depends. I am natively bilingual. I find Spanish pronunciation relatively simple, but that may have to do with my Serbian rather than my English. Having listened to some Italian speech, I'm fairly confident that I could pronounce all of those words easily and even get the intonation down well with some experience. I've also listened to German pronunciation on websites devoted to it and think it wouldn't be very hard to reproduce. Same goes for Bengali (which I spent two months learning 1 hr/day with a native speaker). And for Polish as well. On the other hand, having listened to a bit of Assimil French, I am struck by how even the simplest words are tough to pronounce correctly. To be sure, the front rounded vowels are tough, but I find it tougher to deal with how pronunciation changes based on where letters are located, how many silent letters there are, how many ways there are to write the same thing (or are they really different things but I just don't hear it?), the whole liason phenomenon, etc. Consider yourself lucky, though, as French has a really rough reputation for its pronunciation. Edited by Merv on 05 January 2011 at 3:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5101 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 3 of 18 05 January 2011 at 4:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I've found French pronounciation to be fairly easy so far, but Italian is difficult for me because I can't perform the alveolar trill.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 4 of 18 05 January 2011 at 5:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I find French to be easier too. I can make all of the sounds in Italian accurately without any problem, but the intonation is often difficult for me to produce correctly. In contrast, French has always been extremely easy for me to pronounce, and I've been told I have a near-native accent.
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| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5594 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 5 of 18 05 January 2011 at 10:16am | IP Logged | ||
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French is far easier for me so it is just typical that I am studying Italian. The
trilled R is the main problem, in conjunction with how fast I attempt to speak - too fast and I get tongue tied and too slow and I sound English :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 18 05 January 2011 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find Italian a lot easier than French - fewer vowel sounds, simpler pronunciation rules, no nasal vowels (I still mix up "on" and "an" in French), and a bit more margin for error when speaking to natives. My rolled Rs still aren't perfect but between Russian and Italian they're improving. French's very consistent prosody does simplify things a bit at least, although it can make it harder to understand since picking out individual words can be difficult.
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| JPike1028 Triglot Senior Member United States piketransitions Joined 5398 days ago 297 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Portuguese, Czech | Message 7 of 18 05 January 2011 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I found Italian to be easier, but I was singing in it long before I attempted to learn to speak the
language. I struggled for a long time with the laryngeal [r] in French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 8 of 18 05 January 2011 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Surely the answer can't depend only on the type of R that's harder for you.
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