French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
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French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
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Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#2[dead]
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#3French is such a shitty language. I've been learning Polish lately and every word is spoken exactly as you write it. A real breath of fresh air.
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#4"Hey", /ˈheɪ/, has a dipthong /eɪ/, so é is precisely the first half of that dipthong. It may feel like it's between the “e” in “bet” and “ee” in “see”, but using the dipthong you don't have to guess it.
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#5As a native (Québécois) French speaker who's been living in the US for most of my adult life, something I miss from French is that once you've learned the (many) rules, you can be pretty confident about how to pronounce a given word.
English on the other hand has so many exceptions (usually based on the origin of the word), that I still encounter words that I'll mispronounce at first. I can typically pass as a native speaker, until I "leak" by tripping on one of those.
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#6French is such a shitty language. I've been learning Polish lately and every word is spoken exactly as you write it. A real breath of fresh air.
That's more of an orthographic problem than a language problem.
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#7"Hey", /ˈheɪ/, has a dipthong /eɪ/, so é is precisely the first half of that dipthong. It may feel like it's between the “e” in “bet” and “ee” in “see”, but using the dipthong you don't have to guess it.
Technically true, but this concept is foreign to English speakers. English relies heavily on diphthongs and can’t separate the sounds in their head. Simplest example is probably the word “no” which is very much a diphthong.
That’s why they always have such predictable accents in another language.
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#8French is such a shitty language. I've been learning Polish lately and every word is spoken exactly as you write it. A real breath of fresh air.
Them be fighting words!
But as a native French speaker, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a tricky language. But there is so much pleasure in speaking it that I miss in English sometimes.
Fabrice Lucchini (an actor) is speaking about the language of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (an author from last century): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrkC3vaqB8
Even if you do not speak French, I hope the passion comes through.
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#9French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
For record, if ever you are ashamed to have some accent in french, one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles (about farmer looking for love)
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#10I'm trying to get to B2/C1 in French and intend to move to France in 2028. Over the years I've picked up a little Spanish here, took a few years of German there, etc.
Recently I read _Erec and Enide_ [1] and it was really cool to be able to find the original Old French version of it and read large parts of it (not the whole thing) and find it so much easier to read than Early Middle English like the _Ancrene Wisse_ [2], etc.
One of the things I've really appreciated about LLMs is to be able to ask about the divergence of the Romance languages, e.g. "why does 'y' mean 'there' in French and 'and' in Spanish?" and get a legible response. It's really enhanced the learning experience by taking seemingly arbitrary differences and situating them in historical contexts, etc. I think it makes more connections somehow and helps me build fluency faster.
IDK what my point is, I just find this stuff fun to think about, even if you're not a French language learner. I'm gonna have to dig deeper into this site, thanks for sharing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erec_and_Enide [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancrene_Wisse