Tag Archives: pronunciation
Celebrate Tongue Twister Contest Day with These Tricky French Sentences Posted by Josh Dougherty on Feb 25, 2018
Nothing better than having fun while learning, right? It’s been stated many times on this blog that mastering French pronunciation isn’t the most intuitive exercise, but with enough practice, you can sound quite fluid in your speech. Music is a popular language-learning method. It allows you to hear new words and expressions in context by…
Master The French Nasal Vowels in No Time! Posted by Josh Dougherty on Aug 25, 2017
French pronunciation isn’t the easiest, even for advanced speakers. It requires making new facial expressions to get the perfect sound, awakening barely-used muscles in your vocal tract (French R, anyone?), and rounding your lips more than you thought necessary. It’s a lot of work for learners, but once you have it down, speaking the language…
Can You Pronounce These 10 Difficult French Words? Posted by Josh Dougherty on Aug 13, 2017
Last week, we shared a photo on Facebook listing the 10 hardest French words to pronounce. “Hardest” can definitely change from speaker to speaker, but I can attest that some of these words have certainly thrown me off in the past. Today, we’re going to look at all 10 of these words one by…
The Ultimate Transparent French Blog 2016 Year in Review Quiz Posted by Josh Dougherty on Jan 5, 2017
Another year has come and gone, and what a year it was. The team at Transparent has had a lot of fun writing articles for you every week, but now we’re going to test to see how much you retained 😉 In 2016, the French blog received almost one million hits! We also added another…
French: Regional Variants Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Oct 17, 2016
It’s easy to forget that French is a living language that is in a constant state of flux. We know this to be true, of course, because of new words that are added to the French dictionary each year, or the development of verlan. But sometimes it is easy to forget that language is very…
Be CaReFuL! Final Consonant Pronunciation in French Posted by Josh Dougherty on Mar 5, 2015
Behind French’s beautiful sounds is a very complicated pronunciation system. Unlike Spanish, for example, the words aren’t always pronounced as they’re spelled; c’est-à -dire que c’est n’est pas une langue phonétique (that is to say that isn’t not a phonetic language). Why are –er, –é, –ay, –ai, –ais, –ait, and –aient all pronounced the same? It’s…