juliebird22221 | French - Learn French in a friendly community! | Page 1

minor hullBOT Jul 19, 2025, 8:37 PM

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Please be patient

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charred spindle Jul 19, 2025, 8:37 PM

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app, pleh

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 8:43 PM

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the middle e is a schwa, the weakest vowel sound in French. While you can pronounce it, it often gets dropped in colloquial speech
and -ez conjugations are pronounced /e/, just like "é"

charred spindle Jul 19, 2025, 8:46 PM

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are there resources of how to pronounce french words (rules)? sorry i'm largely learning on my own

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some words i noticed are pronounced the same but written differently

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for example

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il/ils

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elle/elles

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 8:48 PM

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yes, they're pronounced the same, except with liaison, where the -s can be pronounced

charred spindle Jul 19, 2025, 8:50 PM

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is this the case with different verb conjunctions as well?

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for some

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 8:50 PM

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what do you mean?

charred spindle Jul 19, 2025, 8:51 PM

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i'll try my best hmm

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so

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je vais
tu vas
il va / elle va

is this not pronounced the same?

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 8:53 PM

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conjugations change how a word is pronounced, yes
but there can be homophones (words that get pronounced the same)
for instance "va" and "vas" are pronounced the same because the -s is silent

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there are specific rules regarding pronunciation of conjugated verbs explicitely although they are shared across verbs
for instance when I said -ez is always pronounced /e/ in conjugated verbs
or -aient conjugations where -ent is silent

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pronunciation is a whole can of worms. I don't have a singular good resource to share, but still Forvo and Youglish can give good examples for how to pronounce individual words, and people in #prononciation are happy to share, maybe they have some better resource to share

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I'd say experience is a good way to learn pronunciation, you're doing good overall
one doesn't learn how to pronounce words at once, but rather hears a word, wonders why it's spelled like that/pronounced like that, asks questions, gets answers, recognizes patterns, and builds a better intuition

unreal ice Jul 19, 2025, 9:02 PM

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charred spindle some words i noticed are pronounced the same but written differently

learning the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) that's used in french helps, that way you can read how things are pronounced in a dictionary without having to listen to an audio clip

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the rules for reading french spelling are fairly complex and not totally consistent, wikipedia has two big-ass tables if you want to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Spelling_to_sound_correspondences

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better to pick them up over time than try to memorize them all at once

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by learning individual words

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 9:05 PM

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(note IPA is by no means an obligation, but if you actively want to learn the sounds and receive accurate advice from people it's a big help)

unreal ice Jul 19, 2025, 9:10 PM

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Yeah personally I learned IPA after already studying french for a few years and it really made everything so much clearer and cleared up a lot of misconceptions that I had, I wish I had done it sooner

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i didn't really fully "get" nasal vowels until learning IPA, for example

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I thought there was like some kind of phantom n or something

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 9:11 PM

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funny I learned IPA after learning English and it still doesn't help me

unreal ice Jul 19, 2025, 9:12 PM

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really?

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 9:13 PM

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I'm half joking it's just that rules for patterns change a lot, they get pronounced quite differently depending on accent and my issue isn't really with phonemes

unreal ice Jul 19, 2025, 9:13 PM

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ah

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 9:14 PM

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I couldn't guess how to pronounce recce

unreal ice Jul 19, 2025, 9:14 PM

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to be fair I don't think anyone would be able to

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I had already heard the word pronounced, but I had never seen it written

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 9:15 PM

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I know that's English for ya
I just have to watch people try to pronounce warcraft names for the first time to know it's not specific to foreigners

unreal ice Jul 19, 2025, 9:16 PM

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yeah english spelling is a complete mess

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it's funny though, I feel like I see people make more mistakes in french spelling than english. Maybe because of how many equivalent spellings there are for common word endings, é and er being the main ones that come to mind

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or maybe my brain just skips over english mistakes better

woven nova Jul 19, 2025, 9:20 PM

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yeah I was focusing on spelling to pronunciation for English but pronunciation to spelling mistakes in French are common because of homophones and silent letters

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if you're attuned to the language, you can probably guess how a new word is pronounced 99% of the time in French

north shoal Jul 19, 2025, 9:23 PM

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woven nova I'm half joking it's just that rules for patterns change a lot, they get pronoun...

Youglish.com is your friend

charred spindle Jul 19, 2025, 10:20 PM

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north shoal Youglish.com is your friend

thank you

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there are some french words which are starkly easier to understand with vietnamese letters/words/pronounciations than french missydoge

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