nooj wrote:The most important thing, in my opinion, is to have a vast amount of contact with French as it is spoken.
So yes, I stand by my claim that the best way to learn and assimilate a language's intonation is to listen and speak with native speakers of a language. A lot.
I do agree. Imitate, imitate, imitate! And to be specific, for me personally, early on what helped me a lot was to be very analytical of the individual sounds of French. Not every sound at once - choose a problematic sound and work on it. Slow everything down, break everything down, learn to know how a sound is represented by various orthographical representations (do
not trust nor rely on your native language!!), isolate the chosen sounds, analyze them with regards to how native speakers produce them with their mouths (tongue position, teeth, lips, in which part of the mouth is the sound produced), read descriptions in courses. When courses perhaps like these suggested bt Tom (and many others out there-
French in Action is great for this)...
tomgosse wrote:Here are a couple of good resources to start with:
Pronunciation
...focus on pronunciation, pay a LOT of attention! Apply everything you can to your French accent, and never revert back to old non-native habits. Pretend you are French, but you have forgotten your own language. Don’t treat such portions of courses as content you can quickly flick through, pay a LOT of attention! If it’s boring, bookmark it and look at such pronunciation sections for a few minutes a day before doing other types of learning and aim to constantly self analyze.
Every French word that comes out of your mouth ought to sound French, and if it doesn’t, why not? What are you doing wrong? Go back to your pronunciation sections of
quality resources (be careful! some resources ate sloppy with their pronunciation descriptions), get advice.
Also, some resources describe the sounds of a foreign language in comparison to the base language (eg English), but where was the book published and what was the author’s background? No good learning French pronunciation providing explanations comparing with the sounds of British English, while you are American, for example. Unwittingly following such descriptions will have you butcher the language. Not to mention they can be sloppy, such descriptions, and very approximate. Such things must be considered! This is another reason IPA is useful, because it’s
international and standardized, eliminating much of the guesswork out of such pronunciation descriptions.
After you get much of the sounds closer to those of natives, then later you can analyze multiple sounds in succession, sentence intonation and tone. Imitating naturally spoken French at full speed will then be relevant, and very useful.
s_allard wrote:I think it was Dr Olle Kjellin who wrote that we shouldn't be talking about accent reduction as much as accent acquisition. The suggestion never really caught on because I see accent reduction everywhere except maybe with dialect coaches who work with actors aspiring to learn accents for professional purposes. But I think the point Dr Kjellin was trying to make was that instead of thinking of the influence of my L1 on L2, we should concentrate more on acquiring the features of L2.
That bit of philosophizing out of the way, on to some specifics. I think the best way to improve pronunciation is to work with a tutor. This person doesn't have to be an expensive dialect coach or accent reduction specialist. You want someone who can point out the problem areas and who can provide good models to imitate.
What I have observed is that everybody can spontaneously imitate a sound difference when it is brought to their attention and repeated many many times. For example, probably the most difficult vowel sound in French is that associated with the letter u or the IPA /y/ that we hear in words like bu, connu, and rue. With a bit of work on the positions of the lips, everybody can quickly learn to produce the sound.
The really big challenge of course is to produce all the isolated sounds in sequence. What happens is that the sounds are modified as they interact with each other. Plus there are the major considerations of pitch, accentuation and intonation.
All of this can probably be done alone with lots of listening and then practicing by recording one's voice. Here is an excellent article by Dr Kjellin on using software Audacity.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285234145_Quality_Practise_Pronunciation_With_Audacity_-_The_Best_MethodEdit. Typpos
Excellent advice! Do NOT learn French as if you are approximating/associating French sounds to those of your native language. Be like a French baby/child - always acutely aware of whether you are imitating fellow French speakers accurately. Constantly do this, so that you are always comparing your spoken French to that of native French speakers and be flexible. Learn the French accent because you want to sound French, not because you want to sound less American/Australian/Czech/Norwegian etc. See yourself with regards to your French accent as pliable/flexible - always willing to self correct what you thought was previously correct.
Arnaud wrote: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.
I agree with you that the accent is not a disaster, as the audio track is easy to understand but the /r/ is absolutly not a french r. It's a mix of english r and of german hard /ch/. The é sound is a classic problem for italian or spanish speakers, but less common for english speakers...perhaps an interference with Japanese that I see in your profile...
I don't remember exactly who suggested that, but someone learning french said that "phonétique progressive du français" had helped her and was better than FSI french phonology. You could give it a try (easy to find, hmm, hmm...)
Arnaud’s tips are very useful, particularly since he’s a native French speaker. He’s helped me at times, and again demonstrated to me that there’s always room for improvement. That series of course books suggested by Ani would certainly be a worthwhile investment (I have not used them, but I have used other books by the same publisher in similar series, and I trust Ani’s recommendation).
Final tip- Pronunciation cannot be compartmentalized with regards to speech. The two are inseparable, so much so that every single time you speak French you ought to be noticing your accent. You don’t learn pronunciation in a two week block of French then move on and forget about it fir the most part, it’s always there, every time you utter a French word, so you ought to be aware of it to a certain extent every time you speak French. Good luck!