Why the French Don't Understand You
French people don’t understand you when you speak to them in French?
Here are 3 very common pronunciation mistakes that are confusing yet so easy to fix!
Virginie Paradis of French Truly TV http://www.frenchtruly.com
Alain Sandoz: Hello Virginie! I'm an English teacher in... Pelussin! I really appreciate your channel 'cause I can "reverse" it for my pupils. By getting them to know how difficult it is to speak French properly, they pay attention to their own English spelling , grammar and vocabulary. So, many thanks to you!!
Mister S (collège G Baty)
Catherine Poirier: The trick is to learn the french pronunciation of the vowels (especially E and I) and their different combinations (ai, au, eu, oi, ou...) Once you have mastered them, speaking french comes much more naturaly :)
Jeff Math: A comment at this point: to my mind, the English language pronunciation is complicated as hell !
Why do have some sylllables to be stressed ?
Why should a single vowel contain two sounds ? (english "a" = é-i ; english "i" = a-i ; english "o" = e-u ; english "u" = i-u) Why the hell should the same vowel sound differently depending on the word and the location inside the word ?
Like French people (I am), you English speakers have got troubles with vowels, and that's complicated for the rest of the world ! ;-)
Aindrias Hirt: There are three main obsticles for English speakers to speak intelligibly in French. The first is that English is a stressed-timed language; French is syllable-timed. So English speakers are timing when they "bark" in an exhalation and French speakers are timing how many syllables they can fit in an exhalation and have a complete thought. So In English you might say, "Dogs chase cats." Each stressed syllable is set about the same time-distance apart. When you add small unstressed syllables, The barking of the three words doesn't change. So you can get, "Some dogs are chasing the cats." So in this sentence, the placement of "Dogs"-"chas"-"cats") is the same as the first sentence. French is more like, "Bam bam bam bam bam bam bam." So English speakers speed up and slow down and bark for no apparent reason when they speak in French because their timing is still in English. The second thing is that for French to make up for this, the language is highly structured in pitch. So the song of French is different than English. The third thing is that the resting place of the languages is very different. This is the dead give away (beside the French /u/). In North American English, the resting/pivot-point is the "Uhhh" sound you say when you don't know what to say. It's in the back of your throat. English speakers always slide back to this point on most unstressed syllables and at the ends of sentences. The French pivot point is the "peu" sound they make when they don't know what to say. This is also said with the back of your tongue up, but the direction of the air flow is almost directed to your top teeth. So if an English native speaker always tried to end every word with "peu" then most mispronunciations can be avoided. So if you say "beauté-um," it sounds wrong, but if you say "beauté-u (French /u/)" you suddenly sound French because the "é" is now in the French place and not the English place.
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