Module 3 of 8
When the spelling lies
Silent endings, nasal vowels, and why French looks readable and is not.
French spelling is an accurate record of how the language was said several centuries ago. The writing kept the letters; the speech dropped them. So a final consonant is very often not pronounced at all, and an English reader who says what is on the page will be heard as saying a different word, or as saying nothing recognisable.
Two patterns carry most of the beginner difficulty. The French u in tu and salut is not the English "oo" in tout, and swapping them changes which word you said. And the nasal vowels in bon, français and enfant have no English equivalent: the air goes through the nose and the n is not pronounced as a separate sound after it. You need neither phonetic notation nor theory for these, but you do need to hear them, which means checking every new word against a native recording instead of trusting the page. A free pronunciation dictionary is enough. The discipline is to check rather than guess.
Played by your device’s own French voice. It is a synthetic voice, not a recording of a teacher — close enough to learn the shape of a word, not close enough to copy exactly.
- tuyou (informal) — the French u
- toutall, everything — the ou sound, for contrast with tu
- bongood — nasal
- bonjourhello — the same nasal, inside a word
- françaisFrench — nasal
- enfantchild — two nasals in one word
- unone — nasal
- vingttwenty — nasal, and the last letters are silent
- ParisParis — the final s is not said
- mercithank you
- saluthi — the final t is not said
- commenthow — nasal, and the final t is not said
Written French records an older pronunciation than the spoken one. Never learn a French word from the page alone — check it against a native recording first.