What are the pronunciation issues to bear in mind when learning French?
Though French uses the same alphabet as English many of the letters are sounded differently. Fortunately most of the consonants sound like their English equivalents but notice in the program for instance that ‘h’ is never sounded while ‘r’s’ are more prominent. As in English ‘c’ and ‘g’ have two sounds according to the vowel that follows, and the addition of a cedilla below ‘c’ forces it to behave as though it were followed by ‘e’ or ‘I’. You will need to pay particular attention to vowel sounds which are much more precise in French and less likely to slide into another vowel sound. On the positive side there is a great deal of redundancy in the way vowel groups are sounded: for instance, ‘au’, ‘eau’, ‘aux’, ‘eaux’, ‘os’, ‘ô’, o and ‘hô’ all sound like the ‘o’ in ‘so’, as in hôtel and numéro; and ê, è, ai, ais, ait, ei, aî, ë and et sound like the ‘a’ in ‘mayor’, as in mère (mother) and j’ai (I have). The French u is a source of particular difficulty. It has two sounds: one is an ‘uh’
