celine22

[frank stump]

Please be patient

Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.

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Make it descriptive, including relevant context, but also to the point. This way you improve your chances of getting a more relevant and specific answer.

[crystal coral]

@frail oxide #salle-de-classe is only for questions, and the answers go in threads, which is where I'm replying to you.

[frail oxide]

Ohok merci

[untold thicket]

I want to start by saying that the R is one of the least important sounds to get right in order to get understood. While it'll show an accent, an English or Spanish R for instance will be understood just fine. Vowel sounds are much more important for comprehension.

Now, in order to help you with the French R, can I know your native language?

[frank hill]

African accents can pronounce r like a tapped/thrilled r, accents in french polynesia pronounce the r with a kinda tapped r/l sorta like japanese, some créole accents can sound like they use a w instead of r, and so on. As flynn said, it's not TOO important. if you are in the beginning of your learning stuff, I would focus more on pronouncing the vowels! As they impact understanding much more. I talked to a british tourist the other day, they were 100% understandable and pronounced the r like in english. However, if you dont give enough attention to the nasal vowels for example, it can cause confusion. For example: son/sont means sound or his/her or are, sain/sein/saint means healthy/breast/holy/saint and sang/sans/cent means blood/without/hundred. All three of these exemples are the letter s + one nasal sound. Dont use the right one and it creates a lot of confusion lol. I could do the same for most letters + nasal sound

[steel saddle]

learning a new R takes a long time and a lot of practice. I've been studying for 2.5 years and I'm just now starting to feel confident with my R. if you decide to go for it just be patient and be prepared to say the same words hundreds of times to learn the mouth movement

[umbral harbor]

Life is easy when your language already has that sound (me)

[steel saddle]

the process is very similar to learning to play an instrument, it's about consciously slowly repeating a complex movement until it becomes second nature

[lyric harness]

Wait those aren't all pronounced the same?

[frank hill]

Haha well if you want then to be. I first did first /sɔ̃/ then /sɛ̃/ then /sɑ̃/. All the ones separated by / are pronounced the same in my standard european french accent

And this is the easy one cause i only have 3 nasal sounds

Other accents like southern french, some swiss and belgian will have a fourth one and im not sure if there are even more in canadian french varieties

[lyric harness]

I don't get it 🥲

[frank hill]

You see the funny symbols in the / / i put in my response those are IPA writings, its like the standard way to write pronunciation, so that ppl can discuss pronunciation on a neutral ground. The funny symbols represent each one nasal sound that is used in standard european french. Son/sont are pronounced the same way, which is /sɔ̃/. Same for the others i wrote

[lyric harness]

Oooooo okay. How would you tell the difference between them?

[frank hill]

If you search for french nasal sounds on youtube you will see they use the IPA in the thumbnail to illustrate the different sounds. There are different ways to write each nasal sound (in french orthography not in IPA). For example on/om is one nasal sound, en/em/an/am is another and ain/aim/un/in is the third one. Some thumbnails will include a fourth symbol because as i said some accents have more nasal sounds than i do. Its your call to decide what version of french you're interested in but personally i dont hear the difference with the fourth one. I picked one video that seems to discuss the 3 nasal sounds and not 4, is spoken in slow french and has subtitles: https://youtu.be/O1GgP-SNLvw

[frail oxide]

Hii sorry for the late response lol. I didn’t know i would get a reply🥲. My native language is Malayalam which is one of the languages originated in south of India.