How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

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Sarafina
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How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby Sarafina » Sat Dec 23, 2017 12:25 pm

My pronunciation used to be really atrocious. I could not have had a worst foundation in learning French pronunciation. Learning a language by hearing a class of 30 students simultaneously butcher the French language with very little attempt on the teacher's side to correct pronunciation.

I never learnt how to pronounce French properly and I used to sort of make it up as I go along. Recently I've got a tutor who has helped me with my pronunciation and I've been listening to more French native materials so my pronunciation is now halfway decent. I still have some fossilised pronunciation mistakes but it's getting better and occurring less and less. But my accent is still thick and immediately gives me away as someone who is learning it as their second language.

Although it would be nice to be able to speak French and for people to mistake me as native speaker, I am happy to settle for French people not being able to immediately know that French is my second language and to have very faint/hardly noticeable English accent when speaking French.

Can anyone recommend any French phonology courses that they found helpful? I've tried to incorporate shadowing into my language timetable? Should I be doing more shadowing in French? If so how often and how long?
If possible I'd like to avoid having to learn the IPA.
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby rdearman » Sat Dec 23, 2017 12:55 pm

You should learn IPA. It will not take as long as you think, couple of weeks maybe. The bonus is every dictionary then becomes a pronunciation tutor.
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby nooj » Sat Dec 23, 2017 1:47 pm

But my accent is still thick and immediately gives me away as someone who is learning it as their second language.


What exactly do you mean by thick? Do you mind recording yourself by Vocaroo and posting a short snippet, preferably not reading something, but introducing yourself, what your interests are, etc so people here can have a listen?

Can anyone recommend any French phonology courses that they found helpful?


The thing is that they assume some kind of knowledge of IPA.

It really is a worthwhile investment to learn IPA, not because it will magically make you speak the language better, but it will give you at the very least a better situational awareness of what is happening in your mouth, your nasal cavity, your throat and lungs.

Then, when someone says: "well the most widespread pronunciation of the French rhotic is a form of voiced or voiceless uvular fricative', then you know what part of the mouth that sound is being made in, as opposed to something extremely vague like "the French /r/ is guttural", which in linguistic terms is wrong (the uvula not being a part of the throat, which is what guttural means) and extremely vague in any case. Untrained speakers have a mistaken tendency to characterise any number of sounds as guttural, some of which don't have anything to do with each other.

Here's a website I just googled that looks useful.
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby Sarafina » Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:23 pm

https://vocaroo.com/i/s01Lh2JyRXiP

Here's a recording of me speaking in French for a bit. Apologies in advance. I can record myself saying something longer but I didn't want to subject anyone to hearing my French so close to Christmas. :lol:
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby Sarafina » Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:28 pm

I think I'll need to bite the bullet and probably have to learn IPA at some point.
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby Sarafina » Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:29 pm

Here's a website I just googled that looks useful.

Thank you for the link. It looks helpful.
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby Kraut » Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:41 pm

It would be basic to learn how the French sounds are produced, the binding s, the fact that an "e" can be dropped etc
But there is an additional problem in spoken French, the fact that chunks of a sentence, half sentences, complete sentences are pronounced "as one word" with the accent falling on the last syllable. This "one word sentence" is called "chaíne parlée". Doing this fluently can only be mastered at an advanced level. The concept of the correct sentence must already be ready in your head before you say it. If you have to work out the correct word order while speaking, you have already destroyed the "chaine parlée".
Can you say "I haven't told you this" quickly in French? It's "Je_n_vous_ai_pas_dit_ca." "I haven't told you this yet" would be ""Je_n_vous_ai_pas_encore_dit_ca." Beginners/intermediate learners would know "not yet" is "pas encore" but can't build this into the sentence as quickly as natives, if at all.
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby nooj » Sat Dec 23, 2017 3:26 pm

Hey, you sound a lot better than a lot of people I've met! You pronounce the /r/ in the French way, so that's already a huge difference between a lot of English speakers.

First of all, I have hearing problems, so I didn't hear a bit of what you said in the middle.

I heard you pronounce the t at the end of couramment. This does not happen in French, so it should end in the vowel. /ku.ʁa.mɑ̃/

You said je ne suis pas contente (I'm assuming you pronounced the final t, I can't hear that part) des mon accent, instead of what you need to say de. What you need is an unstressed vowel, a schwa. Des and de sound as different as night and day to a French speaker.

You stop and start in places, which is perfectly okay for a learner. More than anything it was the intonation and stress that struck me, French intonation is rather flat and if you draw up the intonation pattern of an ordinary, non-exclamational, non-questioning, declarative sentence in a diagram, you will see a curve that slopes down, until the end of the phrase, which gets the stress.

You said:

__________/
je suis gênÉE....par mon accent.

Whereas a French speaker would say.

_____________________\
Je suis gêné par mon acCENT.

Well, very unscientific notation I know, but I hope it was understandable.
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Dec 23, 2017 4:10 pm

FSI French Phonology is recommended now and then.
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Sarafina
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Re: How can I reduce my accent when speaking French

Postby Sarafina » Sat Dec 23, 2017 5:03 pm

nooj wrote:Hey, you sound a lot better than a lot of people I've met! You pronounce the /r/ in the French way, so that's already a huge difference between a lot of English speakers.

Thank you. It's nice to know that I don't sound completely awful. :lol:


I heard you pronounce the t at the end of couramment. This does not happen in French, so it should end in the vowel. /ku.ʁa.mɑ̃/
Yeah I know that I'm not meant to pronounce t at the end but when I speak I visualise the word in my head and if I have to speak

You said je ne suis pas contente (I'm assuming you pronounced the final t, I can't hear that part) des mon accent, instead of what you need to say de. What you need is an unstressed vowel, a schwa. Des and de sound as different as night and day to a French speaker.
I was trying to say 'Je ne suis pas contente de mon accent'. But I mispronounced de as des. I'll be more careful about that and try to avoid making the same mistake.

You stop and start in places, which is perfectly okay for a learner. More than anything it was the intonation and stress that struck me, French intonation is rather flat and if you draw up the intonation pattern of an ordinary, non-exclamational, non-questioning, declarative sentence in a diagram, you will see a curve that slopes down, until the end of the phrase, which gets the stress.

You said:

__________/
je suis gênÉE....par mon accent.

Whereas a French speaker would say.

_____________________\
Je suis gêné par mon acCENT.

Well, very unscientific notation I know, but I hope it was understandable.


Yeah it's understandable. For me, the next step after having a really pronunciation would be master my intonation when saying French sentences. What would you recommend to improve my intonation in French?
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