How to Learn French - Getting square

I think one of the biggest breakthroughs I had with my French pronunciation was when I realised how many different spellings there were for the same sound.

This realisation helped me to start to synthesise all the different information I had swirling around my head from things I’d heard, been told and read.

As much as I I like to think of myself as a creative soul, I do love a good spreadsheet, so being able to give order to the sounds I was trying to pronounce was a great help.

In the last two posts of How To Learn French, I’ve effectively been opening a new file and working out how many columns and rows I’ll need. In this post, we’re going to take our first look at that grid, so hopefully for the more visual among you it will be very helpful.

Here’s where we were after the first post.

After the second, you could see we were starting to fill in a couple of the rows, demonstrating that there is some order, in fact, to French pronunciation.

Today we’re going to add another couple of very important rows and fill out a column or two, so let’s get to it. On y va* !

Remember, our aim is to set you up with an anchor word that you are confident about pronouncing. This accent produces a sound doesn’t really have an exact equivalent in English. It’s sort of a mix between ay as in hay, and e as in bed. Here are some other options.

étudiant
risqué
étage
préférer
école

This sound is similar to the e sound in egg, or bed. As an anchor word, you may prefer one of the below, or may already have a favourite.

père
après
frère
grève
très

So now, we can fill out our table a little more and hopefully it’s becoming clearer to you just how much crossover there is in the French spelling of sounds (and there’s even more to come).

Have fun playing around with these sounds. I remember it took me ages to get my head around this. Even now, someone will correct my pronunciation or I’ll come across a new word and I really enjoy seeing if I can find a place for it in the grid. I hope you’re finding this helpful.

Bon courage* !

*Let’s go | *Good luck