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b and p

Unlike English, when you pronounce the letters 'b' and 'p' in French, little to no air should be expended from your mouth.

EXERCISE 1

1. Get a loose piece of printer paper or notebook paper.
2. Hold the piece of paper about one inch (or a couple or centimeters) in front of your face.
3. Say the words baby, and puppy like you normally would in English. Notice how the paper moved when you said the 'b' and the 'p' respectively.
4. Now, without making the piece of paper move, say the words belle (the feminine form of beautiful in French, pronounced like the English 'bell.'), and papa, (the French equivalent of "Dad").

• If the paper moved, your pronunciation is slightly off. Concentrate, and try it again.
• If the paper didn't move, congratulations! You pronounced the words correctly!

Aspirated vs. non-aspirated h

In French, the letter h can be aspirated, (h aspiré), or not aspirated, (h non-aspiré), depending on which language the word was borrowed from. What do these terms mean?

• Ex.: the word héros, (hero) has an aspirated h, because when the definite article le is placed before it, the result is le héros, and both words must be pronounced separately. However, the feminine form of héros, héroïne is a non-aspirated h. Therefore, when you put the definite artcle in front of it, it becomes l'héroïne, and is pronounced as one word.

The only way to tell if the h at the beginning of a word is aspirated, one must look it up in the dictionary. Some dictionaries will place an asterisk (*) in front of the entry word in the French-Ennglish H section if the h is aspirated. Other dictionaries will include it in the pronunciation guide after the key word by placing a (') before the pronunciation. In short, the words must be memorized.

Here is a table of some basic h words that are aspirated and not aspirated:

EXERCISE 2

1. Grab an English-French-English dictionary, and find at least ten aspirated h words, and ten non-aspirated h words
2. Make a column of the two categories of h-word.
3. Look at it every day and memorize the columns.

Accents

There are five different kinds of accent marks used in written French. They are:

Acute accent, accent aigu

The acute accent (French, accent aigu) is the most common accent used in written French. It is only used with the letter e and is always pronounced /ay/.

One use of the accent aigu is to form the past participle or regular -er verbs.

Another thing to note is if you are unsure of how to translate certain words into English from French, and the word begins with é, replace that with the letter s and you will occasionally get the English word, or an approximation thereof:

• Ex.:
  • étable --> stable (for horses)
  • école --> scole --> school
  • il étudie --> il studie --> he studies

• And to combine what you already know about the accent aigu, here is one last example:
  • étranglé (from étrangler) --> stranglé --> strangled

NB: This will not work with every word that begins with é.

Grave accent, accent grave

• à and ù

In the case of the letters à and ù, the grave accent (Fr. accent grave), is used to graphically distinguish one word from another.

• è

Unlike à and ù, è is not used to distinguish words from one another. The è used for pronunciation. In careful speech, an unaccented e is prounced /euh/, and in rapid speech is sometimes not prounced at all. The è is prounounced like the letter e in pet.