7 Top tips

What is your favourite thing about spoken French?

I would say my favourite thing about spoken French is the way that every single word just seems to link so well to each other. They’re all interlinked. And different words in a sentence will interlink to make the whole sentence just sound beautiful. As cliché as it sounds, I would say that spoken French just flows naturally, it sounds delicate, it sounds completely different to other languages, and that’s what differentiates it from the other languages that are in the world.

French is so different from English! It’s really hard as an English person to sound French – you have to adopt an attitude and really act it out, and get used to pursing your lips and making some sounds that don’t always come naturally!

I think French sounds pretty musical, I love the way it sounds. It’s actually so much more musical than English. The rise and fall of the French language, and the intonation, are just so different. And it sounds just really exotic to me.

What are your top tips for remembering new sounds and practising pronunciation?

I think it’s really important as a new learner of French to practise the sounds that you have learned. Also, in order to recognise new sounds, it’s really important that you listen to French music, or French podcasts, or watch French films, so that you can pick out these sounds that you have heard, and see the different ways in which they have been used.

It’s also important that you’re not afraid of making mistakes when pronouncing, because the more that you practise speaking a specific word or the pronunciation of something, it will help you realise whether something sounds correct or doesn’t, and then you will eventually fix that, and then master a word.

OU language courses are really good at helping you with pronunciation. There are always plenty of audio files to listen to and practise with. You can supplement this with learning on something like Duolingo, which also makes you say the words. All the practice you can get will help, and the more you do it, the more likely you are to remember how certain spellings of words should sound when spoken out loud.

Unless you’re a very gregarious character, it’ll probably take some time to lose your inhibitions about speaking French and pronouncing things correctly. But the sooner you get started, the sooner you become more comfortable. And nobody expects you to be perfect as a beginner learner. So be bold. So long as you keep trying, you’ll get there. Practise, practise, practise!

There’s one tip I could give you, if you’re a new learner of French and you want to think about how to recognise and remember new sounds, and that’s to try and remember that the last consonant of a word doesn’t get pronounced unless it’s followed by a vowel. It’s a bit tricky to get your head around at first, but once you’ve got that, it will really unlock the way to pronounce French words.

A tip to help you practise your French pronunciation is just lots and lots of repetition. Find something to copy and try to imitate the sounds that you hear. I always think of myself as trying to do an impression of a French person when I speak French. It kind of works for me!

What advice would you give a new learner about developing their speaking skills?

So that you can develop speaking skills as a beginners’ French learner, it’s really important that you put speaking into practice. So, practise with a native speaker, or practise with another student who’s studying French, anyone that you meet that knows French, things like that – it’s really important. The more that you practise speaking, the better that your speaking will inevitably get.

If you’re just beginning to learn French and you’re starting to develop your speaking skills, the best advice I can give you would be: don’t be afraid to have a go. Everyone makes mistakes, even in their native language.

It’s also great if you can find a regular conversation partner to practise with. You could do that through an online conversation exchange site. How that works is, you help them by speaking with them in your native language for a little while, and then in exchange they speak with you in French. I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now, and it’s really helped me a lot with my French and German.