kulaputra wrote:No, I believe it only does that for the nasal variants of œ and ø that it teaches as the same, because it teaches an accent that does not have such a distinction. It does briefly point out, with audio that the distinction exists. Unless you really care about this distinction I'm not sure what the big deal is. Increasingly, the distinction is maintained by fewer and fewer French natives. In particular, standard Parisian French (a prestige dialect, as I'm sure you know) has eliminated that distinction, i.e. brun and brin sound the same.Ani wrote:I'm leaning towards no phonology is better than bad phonology
It's actually /ə/ and /ø/ that they merged, (maybe /œ/ too, I can't remember) and /e/ and /ɛ/ as well. I think that's a dangerous path that will come back to bite you. Basically sorting out those sounds is almost the only reason to do a pholology course, and they make it worse, not better.
The second reason to do pholology is rhythm/intonation. They have a bit but not enough for how long the course is.
Why sort out sounds if they've merged? What about the distinctions the course does sort out, e.g. /i/ vs. /y/ vs. /u/, or the tendency for English speakers to dipthongize everything?
I did check the course before I said what I said, to be sure I wasn't remembering correctly. If you're going to disagree, you should at least take a look again yourself.
Despite what the course says, I am not aware of any French speakers who have no distinction between /ə/ and /ø/. If you go one way with that you'll be ok, of you go the other way, you'll make embarrassing pronunciation mistakes. Page 27
I also don't believe /e/ and /ɛ/ are merged sounds, yet they are merged in the course. Page 21 or 22 I think..
Personally I don't target Parisian French, so I'd rather know the difference between /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/, but at least that one makes sense.. still it's not what I was talking about.