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

13 to read in your first language or languages. Before you ever began to read, you already knew a great many words, and that knowledge included knowing how they sounded, what they meant, and how to say them. You knew all this because your family and your speech community had repeatedly exposed you to those words. Consequently, you already had most of the essential information about thousands of words, except that you did not know how to recognize them in print. Learning to read then taught you how to map the many spoken words you already knew onto the system of printed words, and then how to apply those rules to unfamiliar words. But for all of us who began learning French as adults (that is, teenagers and older), including the author of this book, our lack of elementary knowledge about the French lexicon is a basic fact of life, at least initially. From the standpoint of pronunciation, this means that as adult learners we have no existing auditory knowledge of many words, and we must rely heavily on the spelling system to determine how to read and say them. Now if the rules that govern the relationship between French speech sounds and French spelling were the same as the rules in English, our pronunciation difficulties would be greatly reduced. But our knowledge of English is of little use in trying to decipher, for example, the verb ending of ils parlaient . This combination of letters is not encountered as such in English, and puzzling through how to say aient is unlikely to lead us to the correct solution. Until it is explained to us, we don’t have a clue that the -ent ending is silent and only the ai affects the pronounciation, and that those five letters of the third-person plural imperfect represent a single vowel sound. Moreover, our knowledge of English spelling patterns can interfere and lead to mispronunciations, and, for this reason, part of learning French involves disconnecting letters and letter combinations from their English equivalents in order to reassign them to different sounds. Once the new associations are made, and after a certain amount of time and practice, we begin to acquire the habits that will enable us to read French words confidently and fluently. VOWELS COMPARED English and French share several vowels that are very similar in pronunciation. English has four vowel sounds not found in French (the vowels in pick, cat, shut , and foot ), while French has seven vowel sounds not present in English (in tu , deux , beurre , corps , and the nasal vowels in bon , vent , vingt ). There are also consonant sounds unique to each language (notably, the different r ’s), but the consonant differences are less significant than the differences between the two vowel systems.