We’re going to take a detour this month as a recent trip across the border has given me a fresh perspective on French pronunciation.

A few weeks ago, a group of Chouchous* and I headed south into Northern New South Wales to work on our French. Locked away for a weekend in a beautiful wooden cabin allowed us the time to take a deeper look at the mechanics of French pronunciation.

I say this all the time, but I’m not sure it resonates with beginners particularly: French pronunciation is not that difficult. Granted, French has sounds that we in English do not have (and vice versa - ‘th’ for example), but once you know the rules of French pronunciation it is remarkable how uniformly those rules are applied. It is, in fact, quite rare to encounter exceptions. Even the notoriously-difficult-to-pronounce champagne capital of Reims deviates in only one aspect (the pronouncing of the final ’s’). The rest of the word follows the rules, je te jure*.

I think the problem lies not in my message but in my choice of audience. When people are first learning French, so much is new: different spelling, different sounds, different grammatical structures, different numbering systems (quatre-vingt-onze*, anyone?) that it’s simply a bridge too far for an overwhelmed brain to believe that French pronunciation is arguably much easier than English.

The Chouchous that came to the weekend immersion, however, had been at their French for a little longer and were therefore able to entertain this notion, at least.

We used a series of flashcards to group together different spelling combinations that produce the same sound. An example would be would be the o in tomate* and the au in australien*. Once we had our groups, we then divided up some of the hardest French words to pronounce by sound. The true test came when we took on the French word for squirrel, écureuil (é / cu / reu / il) and I’m happy to report the Chouchous passed with flying colours.

So when I took a look at the list of words in my notes for the article this month and saw the word lieu*, I decided to take un petit détour*. We’ll look at the top five mistakes intermediate learners make in a future article. For now, I’d really like to show you how you can break down French words into sounds to pronounce them with a lot more confidence.

So, here we go. We’re going to learn two sound groups in order to be able to pronounce the word lieu like a pro.

The letter e in French is pronounced very similarly to the first two letters in the English word earth. Of course, if you know your French alphabet, you’ll already know the exact pronunciation.

Alternatively, we all know how to say the French word je, meaning ‘I’. This is the sound you’re after.

The colours are some of the first French words you learn as a beginner, and the colour blue is usually right at the top of the list. The eu sound is bleu is exactly the same as the e sound in je, and by extension, the ea sound in earth.

By the way, another member of the e sound group is œu. This strange little melding of the letters o and e is called the œ ligature in English and (cutely) l’e dans l’o in French (the e in the o). Think of words like œuf (egg), sœur (sister), bœuf (beef) and cœur (heart), among others.

For pronunciation purposes, it functions as a plain e and therefore the combination of œ and u is the same as the eu in bleu. Facile, non*?

Ici, meaning here, is another word we learn right at the start and je suis confiante* that you all know how to pronounce the i sound properly.

If you need un coup de main*, think of the i sound in the English words ‘big’, ‘lift’ and ‘tip’.

So, if we separate the word lieu into its two sound groups, you’ll have the following:

I’m pretty sure you can take it from here…

Bon courage*!

How to Learn French - break it down