Sons et lettres: A Pronunciation Method for Intermediate-level French

12 The instruction you received in reading your first language, whether it was English or another language, was probably quite different from the way you have learned about French pronunciation. As a child learning English in elementary school, one is taught how to say the alphabet, how to recognize and pronounce different combinations of letters, and how to attempt the pronunciation of unfamiliar words by recognizing the elements that constitute them. One learns, for example, that letters of the alphabet stand for certain sounds, and then how to apply this alphabetic principle first to simple and then to more complex words. The learner already knows a great many words, having heard and used them within their language community, and then in school they learn to read and to write them, matching the written forms to what they recognize aurally. Literate English speakers eventually become familiar both with the regularities of English spelling and with its many irregular spellings and pronunciations. In an alphabetic language such as English, the ability to read is founded on this ability to recognize patterns in combinations of letters and to connect those printed symbols with their sounds, their words, and ultimately their meanings. Elementary school taught us that spelling provides a key to knowing how words sound—except, of course, when it doesn’t. It should come as no surprise that the alphabetic principle applies in French as well, and you already know that many of the sounds and spelling rules are not the same as in English. This book aims to teach you to recognize most of the common spelling patterns in Frenchwords and how they correlate to the sounds of those words. With that knowledge you will be able to read both the familiar and the unfamiliar words which you meet in your studies, your travels, or your forays into French media. Hence the title, Sons et lettres : Sounds and Letters. The operating principle throughout these pages is that French pronunciation is remarkably regular and uniform, and becomes less difficult once you know the sounds and the underlying rules. The approach used in Sons et lettres may be similar to lessons you remember from reading instruction in your first language, but there are a number of factors in learning French as an adult that differ from the process of learning to read as a child. First, French has a number of sounds, especially vowel sounds, which are not present in the English sound system. You are already familiar with many or perhaps all of these uniquely French sounds (the vowel sound in tu , for example), but you probably do not have complete confidence in your ability to make those sounds. For each lesson in Sons et lettres , your instructor will model how to produce the sounds that are foreign to English. A second important factor is that, as an adult learner of French, there is an inevitable vocabulary deficit that did not exist when you learned