Les mots, c'est évident, sont la plus puissante drogue utilisée par l'humanité.

2. Vowels and consonants - combinations

ou
Pronunciation: like the "u" in "bush".
Examples: bouche (mouth), genou (knee), cou (neck).

oi
Pronunciation: pronounced like the combination "oa".
Examples: oie (goose), doigt [doa] (finger) (where the trailing "-gt" is silent).

au, eau
Pronunciation: "ô".
Examples: eau (water), bateau (ship).

ai
Pronunciation: "ê" (= [ay] in English, like in "bay" [b-ay]).
Examples: maison [mèson] (house), j'ai (I have), lait (milk), mauvais (bad).

eu, oeu
Pronunciation: "e".
Examples: feu (fire), bleu (blue).

ui
Pronunciation: "ü-i" (two sounds, but closely linked, and short).
Examples: aujourd'hui (today), fruit (fruit) (where the "t" is silent).

er, et
Pronunciation: "é".
Examples: boucher (butcher), boulanger (baker).
Exceptions: hier [ièr'] (yesterday).

on
Examples: bon (good).

an
Examples: an (year).

en
Examples: vent (wind).

in, ain, ein
Examples: matin (morning), main (hand), pain (bread).

The aim of these first 4 parts is to give guidelines for the pronunciation of the main French sounds :
single vowels, vowels combinations and the consonants whose pronunciation differs from the English. This is not an exhaustive description of the French pronunciation since it doesn't make sense to try to cover all aspects of the pronunciation of a language until you can hear actual sounds.

Well, at least, French pronunciation should be no longer a dark mystery for you.

1. Single vowels

a
Pronunciation: like the first "a" in "marmalade" or in "heart", but just a little bit less open.
Examples: table (table), sac (bag), chat (cat), rat (rat), baggage (luggage), sa (his/her), bras (arm), matin (morning).
Similar sounds: â (more open than a).

e
Pronunciation: like the indefinite article "a" in English with a sharper sound, or like the second "a" in "marmalade".
Examples: cheveu (hair), deux (two), second [segon] (second), oeuvre (work, as in master works), soeur (sister), heure (hour), beurre (butter).
Similar sounds: eu and oeu. Both are more open than e.

i
Pronunciation: like the English "ee" but shorter.
Examples: pipe (pipe), minute (minute), courir (to run), midi (midday), nid (nest).

o
Pronunciation: two different sounds:
an open "o" more or less as the English "more" and "for";
a closed one like the English "go" and "low".
Most of the times the "o" in French is open. A kind of "default". It is closed when located at the end of the word. Note that the difference between open and closed "o" is not as stressed as it is in English between the words "open" and "control".
Examples: Open o: botte (boot), grotte (cave), développer (to develop), homme (man);
Closed o: vélo (bicycle), indigo (indigo).
Similar sounds: (to a closed o): au, eau, ô.
Examples: eau (water), auto (car), contrôle (control).

u
Pronunciation: the French sound for "u" does not exist in English. While in most languages "u" is pronounced like the u in "bush", in French it differs dramatically. The French "u" is exactly the same sound as... the German "ü". Like in "über". As we'll see later, the sound "u" as the English "bush" exists in French as well, but it is formed by the vowels combination : "ou".
Examples: voiture (car), minute, humain (human) (note : the "h" is silent).

y
Pronunciation: pronounced the same way as a double French "i".
Examples: noyer [noi-ier] (to drown), rayer [rai-ier] (to scratch), loyer [loi-ier] (lease, rent), pays [pai-i] (country).
Notes

In most cases, the final "e" in a word is not pronounced.
Examples : bouche [bouch'] (mouth).

When followed by a doubled consonant (ll, tt, pp, rr, mm, nn), "e" is pronounced like the English "-ay" as in "say", "bay", but without the glide towards i and more open. In French, this sound is referred to as "è" (e with a grave accent).
Examples : pelle [pèl'] (shovel), mettre [mèttr'] (to put), lettre (letter), terre [tèr'] (land).

[Stay tuned]

10 good news about French

1. French is often said to be THE tongue of Love. If it makes any sense. Whatever... yes, once you know enough French, you are able to grasp, to feel the unique beauty of some texts a lot of countries/cultures envy us, for more than a dozen centuries in some cases.

2. Accessory for some, crucial for others, French is also an important diplomatic language. It has been for long, and will very likely remain as such for a long time to come.

3. Thinking, reading, writing, and speaking in French is rewarding : for this is both a language (read and written) and a tongue (heard and spoken) which borrowed a lot from a number of other languages over the centuries. It is now well-known French's core roots consisted in a popular, degraded version of Latin.
But, what makes today's French so specific is the way the language has almost continuously, quietly, integrated MANY features of other Indo-European languages -- Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, of course, but also : from German, and, more recently, contemporary English. Even Russian contributed to enrich our language. This is particularly observable in the field of adjectives, adverbs, and nouns.
The most constant part, though, --that is, the most difficult to make evolve-- remains the case of verbs. This latter fact alone is at the same time good and bad news. Good, because verbs, altogether with modes and tenses, are a difficult topic in French -- to spell, read, and write. So, adding new verbs too easily would certainly make things even more difficult for newcomers. And it's bad news because the easy coinage of new verbs from nouns for example (as in English) is very productive and suits well our age of information where nouns are kind of mass produced.

4. Fundamentally, the deep structure of active French sentences is very close to those in English. If not identical. And, in most of simple cases, there is no big surprise when it comes to take the active sentence and to transform it into a passive, interrogative, or negative one.

5. French has kept the "tutoiement" / "vouvoiement" ("tu" / "vous") distinction when addressing a "you" someone. You will see this contributes a lot to make the richness of the language as far as inter-personal communication is concerned (to express love, friendship, animosity, distance in speech, hierarchical facts, etc).

6. Unlike a false opinion people happen to have sometimes, it is feasible to make simple sentences in French ! Everybody isn't named Balzac or Molière ! In fact, it happens some very simple sentence structures are sufficient to express VERY STRONG ideas. The most beautiful poems in French are not forcibly the ones with the longest or the richest sentences in vocabulary.
Paul Eluard's poems (<-- in English, there) are a perfect example of the way the poet can use a simple French, accessible to all, to eventually express something so beautiful, it would be less if the sentences were either longer or using a richer vocabulary.

7. French is funny : playing with words and/or their diction in this language is a neverending thread of possibilities.

8. French is cute : there are many different French accents (southern, northern, western, eastern, Paris, etc) to play with, too.

9. French is living : mainly thanks to English, French keeps on adapting itself to our information age. Thus, it's not only the tongue of Love or of diplomacy.

10. French is an interesting language and tongue to teach a sweet American Lady about.


10 bad news about French

1. Overall, yes : one can objectively says French is a rather difficult language and tongue. To teach, and to learn.

2. Probably more than other Latin-derived languages (say, Italian and Spanish, both rather "homogeneous"), it is especially difficult to learn and to teach without audio media support. Because Latin wasn't the only influence of importance, if only for the language's core. The melting of the Gaulles' people (ruled for long by the Romans) with German and Normand peoples coming in and out has contributed a lot to make what serves now as the roots of this language and tongue.
Hence, these lessons cannot be intented to teach French completely (for oral, vocal support and practice are obviously mandatory, in the end, to grab correctly the language's "heterogeneity"). Instead, they are only meant to give a taste, hopefully useful enough, for further study(ies) of what our language is.

3. Grammatical, spelling, and/or diction mistakes done by the locutor in French sadly tend to "shock more" the auditor/reader than it is the case in English, for example. This can be also considered good news, though : since it means you can be more easily, more often, warned about your lack of practice.
I have experienced that many native english speakers are very indulgent with foreigners learning English and not fluent at it. In fact, it's not french people are less indulgent a priori, of course : it's just our language, for the sake of basic understanding of what the sentence means, tolerates less deviations than English does !

4. Non-animated things have one of either two genders, "female" or "male" (there is no handy "neutral") : a table is "female", a bed is "male". And, you guessed it : genders distribution over nouns follows no logical rule. You have to learn them "by heart".

5. Articles and adjectives follow the gender of nouns. Mistakes with them sometimes make the spoken sentence hardly intelligible, sadly.

6. Irregular English verbs (regarding the preterit form) are a joke compared to the case of French verbs in a similar case. There are three different "groups" of verbs, in French. Each with its own specific forms for its members' present, past, future, and conditional. Two of these groups are said to be "regular" (the 1st and 2nd). The 3rd basically gathers anything which can't be put in the first two. And there's even a couple of "freak" verbs (amongst them are "to be" and "to have" -- similar exception to the English's) which can't be put in any of these three groups !
Not to mention irregular plurals : for plurals, there are rules, then exceptions to rules (a.k.a irregulars), then pseudo-rules for exceptions, then exceptions to the pseudo-rules for exceptions ! But, well... there's also a set of simple mnemotechnic "tricks" to handle most of the "evil" cases, fortunately. Be happy.

7. Since French borrowed a lot from other languages, it is often difficult to "guess" about the plural and/or gender of a word with a foreign origin ("foreign" in the sense : not derived from Latin).

8. French has accented letters and diacritics. Ignoring them for computer-entered text is not especially shocking for the reader. But, as soon as you try to hand-write a letter to someone, it's a good idea to know them !

9. Some sounds (either based on vowels or consonants) are particularly difficult to handle by native english speakers. The good news is French folks are very tolerant with that because we love the English accent mixed with French, probably more than any other tongue's accent.

10. In all, thanks to its richness, and because of it, don't expect to be a fluent French reader/writer/speaker, with unnoticeable origin, before some years, on the average. But, is it really bad news, after all ?


Before continuing though, I highly recommend you to have a look at, and bookmark, the following (great) resource, coming from a voluntary initiative :

Yours,

Amicalement.