81–90 of 165 posts
As a native in English speaker, I refuse to switch to the French keyboard when writing in French I just don’t bother with accents. Why can’t French just be normal and know how to pronounce words without any hints like we do in English?
As 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…
Doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, but it's staggering how internally inconsistently English is.For example "read" and it's famous past tense, differently pronounced "read".
Still, we've got a couple fun ones au Québec, like betterave "bet-rav" caught me off guard or gruau "gree-au".
Wait, no! This is the most complicated one, fortunately it's scarcely appears.
In canoë, the ë is pronounced as an é. In Noël, it's pronounced as an è. In ambiguë, it's not pronounced at all!
French 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)
You pronounce "fête" as "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)? To my hear these two sound very different.
Not GP but I want to note that the pronounciation of "faith" would never occur in metropolitan French, as it features a diphthong. And in Quebec fête has a diphthong but féte would not have one I think (please correct me if I am wrong), and it is not the one in faith anyway.
As a native in English speaker, I refuse to switch to the French keyboard when writing in French I just don’t bother with accents. Why can’t French just be normal and know how to pronounce words without any hints like we do in English?
As a native in English speaker, I refuse to switch to the French keyboard when writing in French I just don’t bother with accents. Why can’t French just be normal and know how to pronounce words without any hints like we do in English?
Good luck guessing the pronounciation just gotta learn it. Clearly the superior system.
If there's one thing I wish someone pointed out when I was just starting learning French is this: é - the accent is pointing up, so it's a higher-pitched e è - the accent is pointing down, so it's a lower-pitched e That's it. That's how it should be explained. * It's also in their names - aigu and grave, but this requires knowing what these words mean.
And ê, when pronounced (most of the cases) it's just a è. ë, contrary as said in the article (full slop?) is the most complicated and with some exceptions. But there is so few words that use that letter that you just don't have to care. Just pronounce ë as è when its in (inside) a word and not pronounced at all when it's at the end. The only exception I can think of is canoë (pronounced conoé), but everybody will und…
What else is there with ë except for Noël and Israël ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had that "a-ha" moment not at first by learning that "fenêtre" means "window", but later when I learned the German word is "Fenster".
Or defenestrate...
If there's one thing I wish someone pointed out when I was just starting learning French is this: é - the accent is pointing up, so it's a higher-pitched e è - the accent is pointing down, so it's a lower-pitched e That's it. That's how it should be explained. * It's also in their names - aigu and grave, but this requires knowing what these words mean.
> That's it. That's how it should be explained. That's contingent on your ability to imagine sounds doing ups and downs.
I'd think that associating pitch increase/decrease with up/down works for the vast majority of people without any second thought.