Oral Vowel Tuning

French Vowel Tuning

Compared to other latin languages such as Spanish or Italian, French has a rich menu of vowel sounds. But English has even more vowel sounds. As an adult, you will associate certain letters with certain sounds.

Many of these same letters represent completely different sounds in French. For this reason, you will have a tendency to mispronounce French words simply because you learned them through writing.

To prevent this from happening, we use an easy-to-understand and phonetic respelling system. For each symbol, there will be only one sound to represent it (as you'll see later).

For now, you will focus only on the oral (as opposed to nasal), unrounded vowels. Note that ALL BUT ONE of these sounds exist in English.

Once again, English speakers can get easily confused by the differences in writing systems between the languages. To avoid this confusion, we will rely on International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols.

And don't worry - IPA is not difficult when you have a logical mental framework to fit them into. To help you better understand the unrounded and oral French vowels and their IPA symbols, I have divided them into sets.

The 1st set uses symbols that exist in English
The 2nd set uses symbols that do not exist in English

The First Set

Listen to the audio file to the right.
The Vowel sounds occur in the following order.

a...i...u...e...o

In the section below, I list all of the English speaker mis-pronunciation tendencies for each vowel of this set.

/a/

This sound is more OPEN (tongue lower in mouth) than the vowel sound in the American English words "not", "pot", "hot."
There is a strong English tendency to close this vowel, since English "a" is more closed. Be sure to exaggerate its openness by lowering your jaw as much as possible when saying this sound.

/o/

This sound is more OPEN (tongue lower in mouth) than the vowel sound in the English words "so", "go", "toe."
Typically, when this sound occurs in English you combine it with the vowel /u/. You must learn to create this sound without the /u/ at the end.

/e/

This sound is similar to that of the English words "hey", "bay", "say", "lay."
The English vowel in the words "hey", "bay", "say" and "lay" is actually two vowels combined: /e/ and /i/. You must learn to pronounce the /e/ sound without adding the /i/ to the end.

The Second Set

This set contains three vowels all represented by phonetic notation that does not exist in English writing. But remember - even though the symbols do not exist, the sounds still exist in English.

ə
ɛ
ɔ

/ə/

This is the only vowel that does NOT exist in English.
It is closest to (but not the same as) the vowel in the English word "the".
It is slightly more CLOSED than this vowel.
The audio on the right alternates between the two.

/ɛ/

This is the same vowel as in the English words "bed," "met", "red."
The pronunciation is more open than /e/ (i.e. tongue is lower in the mouth).

/ɔ/

This is the same vowel as in the English words "awe", "saw" and "raw" ("hot" and "not" too for British English).
The pronunciation is more open than /o/ (tongue is lower in the mouth).

As you progress through the song lessons, you should refer to this page often. When you receive feedback on your pronunciation, it is likely that your error will have already been explained on this page.

As you gain more practical experience with French sounds, these explanations will become more clear, so don't let this be the last time you visit the page.

Once you are comfortable with everything on this page, you can move on to The Rounded Vowels of French.