Pronunciation Tips

Listening to French regularly will really help you to improve your pronunciation as you will become much more familiar with the different sound patterns and will therefore begin to reproduce these more easily. You do need to practise though and although you may feel a little silly, reading out loud is very important.

Here are some activities that you could try:

1.     Listen and repeat:

  • Copying and repeating words or phrases over and over is an excellent way to develop your pronunciation skills.

  • Listen to a very short extract that comes with a script (click to use the texts on our listening tips page).

  • Play a small part of the recording, pause the recording and repeat.

  • If you are unsure whether you are pronouncing the words correctly, then you could record yourself and compare your recording to the original.

2.     Time yourself:

If you have completed a short piece of work, or even just a couple of sentences, practise reading them out loud and time yourself.

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The more you repeat them, the quicker you will be able to say them and the more automatic your speech will feel.

Again, you could record yourself and then listen carefully to the playback - you might discover pronunciation mistakes that you're not aware of when you speak.

3.     Rhythm:

  • Instead of listening to a sentence and trying to repeat the sentence using words, you could listen to sentences (perhaps spoken a little more quickly) and just ‘la la’ the rhythm.

  • Again, you may feel a little silly doing this, but rhythm and stress is very important to making yourself understood easily.

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4.     Create a Habit!

Make reading out loud a habit. Whether you are reading magazines, short stories, simple passages from text books, reading out loud will accustom you to speaking in French and will enable you to practise your articulation so your mouth doesn’t get stuck around certain words!