How to Learn French - Anchors away!

In the last How To Learn French post, I mentioned that there are certain things that seem to trouble most learners, regardless of their level. I named the letters e and i in the French alphabet as particular bugbears.

So for this post, I thought I’d share one of the techniques I learned when it was time for me to really come to grips with French pronunciation. It may surprise you to know that it wasn’t just before my Year 12 exams, or in preparation for moving to Paris many years later. It wasn’t until I started tutoring French upon my return that I realised I’d been approximating many of the French sounds until that moment.

Looking back, I know my accent was okay, but it wasn’t until I sat down with The Good Pronunciation Guide put out by Bien Dire publications (very highly recommended) that it dawned on just how loose a lot of my pronunciation was. In an effort to tighten it up, I pored over the little booklet that came with the CD (yes, it was il y a longtemps*) for many, many hours. As frustrating as it was (at times I wanted to tear my hair out) it was ultimately very illuminating.

With the booklet’s help, I was able to group together combinations of letters and accents that made the same sound. For example, the sound è can be written in a variety of ways: è, ai, ei and ê, to name a few. We’ll get into that in a future post, as I can see I’m already starting to get ahead of myself. Before learning the different spelling combinations for a particular sound, we need to have a fail-safe way of remembering the sound itself. Enter the idea of anchor words.

An anchor word is a word a student already knows how to pronounce and can therefore recall easily. We use these words as a reference point to ensure our pronunciation stays on track and doesn’t drift along in the linguistic tides.

So, let’s get right into by taking a look at the French vowels. I’ve offered up my personal anchor words, but feel free to choose another from the ones I’ve listed, or encore mieux*, come up with your own. I’d really recommend you start a little list in a notebook you can access at all times. I think you’ll be surprised by how reassuring it is and therefore how often you’ll reach for it.

By the way, if you’re not absolutely sure of the pronunciation of my anchor words, you can check on this very helpful little website.

Others you might like:

la
ma
voilà
baguette
chat

Others you might like:

le
me
de
demain
revoir

lit
Lyon
Fifi
midi
Paris

Others you might like:

orange
dos
trop
photo
gogo

Others you might like:

bus
jus
tutu
uniforme
lu

Remember, the more you identify with a word, the more likely it is to come to mind when you need it.

Next time, we’ll look at some vowel combinations (like oi, ui, ou and others) and hopefully you’ll start to see how quickly you can combine the sounds in your anchor words to confidently pronounce words of more than one syllable, and, with a new degree of confidence, even words you’ve never come across before.

Bon courage*!

*a long time ago | *even better | *Good luck