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LesRonces wrote:What's the Phonétique book like? Like the Conjugaison book but with phonetics i guess ? Listen and repeat stuff or something ? I would definitely be interested in something like that if you or anyone else has used it.

I have the intermediate Phonétique book (and the answer book that accompanies it). For me, it's one of the most useful books in the whole series of Progessive du Français. (You really don't need the beginner book: intermediate book covers all the basics well).
Like other books in the series, in this book, the explanations on the left are immediately followed by exercises on the right. After an introductory section (8 chapters) that deals with characteristics of spoken French, there are sections on vowels (some 20 chapters), consonants (14), semivowels (2), and finally a section dealing with communicative activities. The book comes with audio but you need to buy the answer key separately.

First section (which I find really nice) deals with things such as l'enchaînement, la liaison, l'intonation etc. The next two sections take French sounds (that are similar or difficult to differentiate but important) in groups of two or three. In every chapter, a description of how each sound is produced is shown with pictures of the tongue position, the shape of lips etc. This is followed by some notes on how these sounds are represented in spelling. As you guessed, some exercises are Listen and Repeat but there are other types that require you to produce oral responses according to a given pattern/questions.

Publishers website used to have a Look Inside function for some/most of these books but after the recent revamp of the website,
it's gone. Here is the link to the relevant page:
https://www.cle-international.com/reche ... gories/699

Overall, I find it to be very useful. Having said that there are several alternatives as good as this one. For example:

These two from Hachette
http://www.hachettefle.com/ouvrages_Exe ... 56984.html
http://www.hachettefle.com/ouvrages_Exe ... 57545.html

These two from Didier
https://www.editionsdidier.com/fr/sous- ... ncais-a1a2
https://www.editionsdidier.com/fr/sous- ... u-trancais

These two again from Didier
https://www.editionsdidier.com/fr/sous- ... phonetique

Or this book (Typical of CENGAGE, this is quite expensive and you can't get the answer key unless you are a lecturer. Copies of the previous edition can be bought at a much lower price)
https://www.amazon.fr/dp/1305652592/ref ... 4P3V75NZ7F

If you prefer a book in English, there's one from Pronounce it Perfectly series. As far as I know all other language books (except the English one) in the series are out of print. Unlike other books in the series which, in my opinion, are not very useful, this French book is different and quite good. (However, I prefer the French books).

https://www.amazon.com/Pronounce-Perfec ... +in+french

Hope this helps.

Edited for typos.

aravinda wrote:First section (which I find really nice) deals with things l'enchaînement, la liaison, l'intonation etc.

Please tell me it deals with plus and tous under changing circumstances ! That alone would be worth the price of the book to me.

schlaraffenland wrote:

aravinda wrote:First section (which I find really nice) deals with things l'enchaînement, la liaison, l'intonation etc.

Please tell me it deals with plus and tous under changing circumstances ! That alone would be worth the price of the book to me.

I checked my book. It has few scattered exercises covering plus and tous but it's definitely NOT worth buying the book for them alone. However, I am glad you asked. It reminded me of a booklet on French phonetics which I forgot to mention in the above post. It doesn't have audio (author never intended so) but it's great.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0875632157/_e ... G4L434FYVR

I don't have my copy at hand but I found the part you need from a Preview (hope this is not a copyright violation):

. Tomorrow the big mission starts... and now I feel unwell Nothing however will stop me, not even death!!

I wouldn't tempt the Grim Reaper, that guy has no sense of humour!

PeterMollenburg wrote:

. Tomorrow the big mission starts... and now I feel unwell Nothing however will stop me, not even death!!

I wouldn't tempt the Grim Reaper, that guy has no sense of humour!

This is very odd. According what I'm looking at, I wrote the above about the Grim Reaper! (I didn't) And yet my original post replying to Arnaud's has disappeared! Ah, not going to lose sleep over it, but if someone can fix it, that would be... well... better I guess.

Edit: I've recovered my post (pasted below). I have no idea how it disappeared! So who did write the above about the Grim Reaper, coz it wasn't me.

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Arnaud wrote:

LesRonces wrote:I might be totally wrong here but to me this phrase seems unnatural.

You're wrong, the whole text is unnatural. But that's normal, Peter isn't yet C2. The text is too heavy, the grammar must be at the service of the text, and not the contrary. Let's take the first sentence:

J'ai dû aller au centre-ville de la grande ville aujourd'hui pour un rendez-vous et après qu'il a été terminé, je me suis décidé d'aller à un magasin à une demi-heure en plus en voiture de l'endroit où j'ai eu le rendez-vous.

Aujourd'hui, j'ai dû aller au centre-ville pour un rendez-vous et j'ai ensuite décidé d'aller dans un magasin à une demi-heure de voiture de l'endroit où j'étais. (it's a proposition of improvement, someone else could have written something else, of course)

Repetition of "ville" and "rendez-vous": good style=no repetition (it's a rule of thumb, so that means that you have to structure your text in a way that the repetitions aren't necessary, by using a good word order or implying some things (here I imply that as you go to the city center, you live in the suburbs or in a little town in the back country: no precision is necessary: I can remove "la grande ville"), après que + indicatif (congrats, you know your grammar, but too heavy here), se décider à/décider de, une 1/2 heure en plus en voiture (not correct).
I myself repeat the verb "aller", I could have written "se rendre" to avoid that, but "aller" is super frequent, so it's not a big problem.

Thanks Arnaud for your clarifications. The reason I repeated 'ville' (I was debating whether I should) was indeed a precision thing. If I just said j'ai dû aller au centre ville that would feel wrong to me because it would be suggesting I had to go into the town centre of where I live. I didn't. I had to go into the town centre of the major city of which I live 60kms from the centre of. I didn't really know how to express this while being precise and not repeating myself. Perhaps I was just to accept that precision wasn't possible in this phrase.

Still, I greatly appreciate all of your assistance here, and I'm sure it's clarifying things for others not just myself. It's clear I need to keep pushing on. Tomorrow the big mission starts... and now I feel unwell Nothing however will stop me, not even death!!

PeterMollenburg wrote:

PeterMollenburg wrote:

. Tomorrow the big mission starts... and now I feel unwell Nothing however will stop me, not even death!!

I wouldn't tempt the Grim Reaper, that guy has no sense of humour!

This is very odd. According what I'm looking at, I wrote the above about the Grim Reaper! (I didn't) And yet my original post replying to Arnaud's has disappeared! Ah, not going to lose sleep over it, but if someone can fix it, that would be... well... better I guess.

Edit: I've recovered my post (pasted below). I have no idea how it disappeared! So who did write the above about the Grim Reaper, coz it wasn't me.

----------------------------------

Maybe it was the Grim Reaper himself, in which case, it might be smart to heed his warning.

aravinda wrote:I don't have my copy at hand but I found the part you need from a Preview (hope this is not copyright violation):

Thank you! That's really helpful. I guess I need to repeat these things out loud until they stick. I have read the French Wiktionary article for plus a dozen times, read explanations in English on how to remember the differences... I guess it comes back with time.

PeterMollenburg wrote:

PeterMollenburg wrote:

. Tomorrow the big mission starts... and now I feel unwell Nothing however will stop me, not even death!!

I wouldn't tempt the Grim Reaper, that guy has no sense of humour!

This is very odd. According what I'm looking at, I wrote the above about the Grim Reaper! (I didn't) And yet my original post replying to Arnaud's has disappeared! Ah, not going to lose sleep over it, but if someone can fix it, that would be... well... better I guess.

One of my posts went crazy like that last week and I had to PM the mods for a fix. I've never seen that kind of glitch on a forum but it appears something funky is happening. Someone quoted me and instead of being a quote, it looked like I wrote the post and suddenly the quote if the post that I had written was attributed to the person who actually wrote that post. I suggest tagging the mods.


Also, I'm so excited about tomorrow! This starts, and also it is the book keeping start of the new school year which means I can order all the books and office supplies my little heart can dream of "Book day" when they all show up, is better than Christmas.

And Arnaud, you are awesome for explaining that! Thank you.

If you limit the Google results to ".fr" domains (good way to avoid garbage, in my experience), "aller dans un magasin" has far more results.

Came across this today: https://french.kwiziq.com/dalf-c1-tips