Cainntear wrote:There is a danger here.
As a learner, it's very easy to miss subtle "reduced" sounds in listening.
I think ninuno's main concern here is about the psychology of French speakers (not dealing with reduced pronunciations), because as a learner he thinks of the -p of camp as "primary" in a way (because we learners rely a lot on written representations), so the -p "is dropped" in pronunciation. But native speakers who learned it since they were babies think of the word as primarily the sound "[kɒ̃]" (ninuno's "kan"), and think of the spelling "camp" as the rather arbitrary convention to write it down. Think of English speakers, for whom the decision of using -ant or -ent (immigrant, affluent) is a matter of pure, annoying memorization.
So I tried to tell him/her that he can't become a native speaker anyway, so their psychology is not something to worry too much about, even if it's interesting and worth having in mind (for, say, understanding misspellings: immigrent, affluant, grammer...). There are probably better ways to approach French pronunciation and spelling anyway, like making use of her/his English.
For example, in Spanish, there are accents that are reported as "dropping the S" at the end of syllables, when in fact the S is simply realised as a slight hh sound or a brief hiatus in speech. I've met quite a few people who report having learned Spanish while backpacking in South America, and they all literally drop their Ses, and it's definitely not the same thing. It sounds weird, and it makes understanding difficult -- you can't even tell if they're talking in singular or plural half the time.
Yes, a lot of Spanish learners (and people who I'd hope would know better, such as some Spanish teachers and conlangers) often get it wrong the way you describe. The Spanish of Chile, Argentina, the coasts of Peru and Ecuador, much of Andalusia, has a lot of [h] (the h-sound) for "s" at the end of a syllable, so in those regions it's "lo[h] pe[h]cado[h]" (los pescados), not "lo pecado".
However, there are dialects that genuinely drop a lot of "s"s though. You can find them in Andalusia (more so in eastern spots, I think), and in the Caribbean. And by the latter I mean Cuba, the Dom. Rep., Puerto Rico, Panama, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, Colombia and Venezuela.
The Caribbean dialects in fact have undergone a change similar to that of French for number or German for cases, where the distinctions are retained in the articles and other determiners (le/les, ce/ces, mon/mes; der/den/dem/des) even though they have been lost for the most part in adjectives and nouns. So in Caribbean Spanish you hear "la mesa" (=
la mesa) vs. "la[h] mesa" (=
las mesas). Caribbean Spanish has also gone a bit the way of English, by using the subject pronouns a lot more as a way to deal with ambiguities in the verbs (so they say
tú tienes and
él/ella tiene because otherwise
tienes and
tiene would sound the same). Their dropping of "s" has gotten to the point that they sometimes add it unnecessarily (in linguistics, hypercorrection), saying and writing "fusmar" for standard
fumar, for example. This whole thing is not wholly consistent though, and the -s of "mesas" in
las mesas may still be optionally pronounced.
In Andalusia, though, the distinction often survives by using new extra vowels, so
tiene sounds as usual, but
tienes sounds like "tien[ɛ]", with an [ɛ] sound like that of English b
ed or French je j
ète. Something similar goes for "pollo" vs. "poll[ɔ]" (= pollos), the latter with the [ɔ] of German
Zoll, and so on for the other vowels.
Relatedly, consider the Spanish of El Salvador and Honduras, where s-b, s-d, s-g, s-y and s-ll merge into a single sound. So
la doctora sounds as usual (with a weak d sound in doctora, similar to the "th" of "the, then, thou", IPA [ð]), but in
las doctoras, "s d" merge into a single strong d sound, like the d of Spanish
andar (so
las doctoras = IPA [ladoɣˈtoɾas] or [ladoɣˈtoɾah]). This is important for verbs in these dialects, because the difference between the object pronouns in
lo llenó and
los llenó is only found in the sound used for the "ll", weak ll for the singular and strong ll for the plural (IPA [lojeˈno] and [loɟʝeˈno]). If you ever come across a Salvadoran writing the expression
Dios guarde 'God help us!' as
Diocuarde, now you know the reason why (it's because "Dios guarde" is pronounced "Dioguarde" with a strong g sound, [djoˈgwaɾde], and the -c- is an attempt to write this down).
