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

27 decipher (especially in the case of consonants), but some characters are non- alphabetic (e.g., / Z /, representing the sound “zh” in the word jour ) and some symbols are at odds with what they stand for in French or English spelling (for example, /y/ does not represent any of the sounds we associate with a y , such as in baby or youth , mythe or yaourt ; it represents the vowel sound in French tu ). Since IPA characters are commonly used in French dictionaries, you may want to learn them in order to have the key to dictionary pronunciations. It is not required that you learn them in order to use Sons et lettres , however; it will be sufficient if you recognize the equivalence between the sound you will hear for a rule and the symbol you will see.