FYW 189 : French pronunciation: What’s the difference between a “mute H” and an “aspirate H”?

This episode is an exclusive peep into one of the lessons from my online French pronunciation and intonation course “How to sound like a native French speaker”. If you yet need to find out the influence of the latter “H” in the French liaison, or simply if you need a French phonetics brush-up, this episode is for you!

I’ll also read and comment on a testimonial for my French pronunciation course...and have a bit of a rant against some language “teaching” methods!

Vocabulary and Spelling of the French Words mentioned in this episode

Testimonial for my online course “How to sound like a native French speaker”:

I have just completed your e-pronunciation course. It was truly amazing!! I just loved every minute of it.

I can’t begin to tell you how helpful it was.  I would not even be able to tell what I found the most helpful since there are so many aspects of the course that were brilliant!  I reviewed each section in turn several times – and will continue to do so. Each time I review it, I pick up some new nugget of information.

This course was so expertly crafted!!  Not only did I realize with horror how wrong my pronunciation was – but your course gave me the knowledge to figure out how to correct it!  Learning the international phonetic alphabet is a life-saver.

You are truly a ‘killer’ teacher!  I took French in high school where it emphasized that we would learn to read and write and not to speak or have any kind of oral comprehension.  Not to say that we did not have to read out loud in the class every so often.  Whenever I read out loud my teacher would say, ‘good try but good thing you are so good with reading and writing French’.  She never corrected me!!!   A ‘killing’ teacher....

Last Fall I decided to follow a lifelong dream and started to take French classes at a French community centre.  The teacher is a native speaker.  At every class we were given photocopied sheets of exercises to do during the class (I laughed when you mentioned that in your podcast about ‘killing teachers’!)  Then he would read a dialogue ONCE and we were then to turn to the person next to us to practice the dialogue with.  The person next to me of course was as clueless as I was as to how to pronounce anything.  He would go around the class to listen to us.  With so many students, you were lucky if he got to you.  He would correct certain words – but not tell you why they had to be pronounced that way.

One day midway through the course, my partner and I were doing a particularly terrible job of the dialogue.  When he got to us, I told him that I wasn’t going to ‘butcher’ the language anymore and I declined to read it.  I quit the class that very day.   I was just devastated and thought I would never reach my dream of speaking French.

During this time I was checking out various courses on the internet and came across yours.  I listened to a number of your podcasts and knew that I had found a very special teacher.  I could not wait to buy your course and begin learning the ‘correct’ way to pronounce this beautiful language.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart Jessica.   I was so despondent during my classes.  But now I know that with practice, I may eventually be able to speak this truly musical language without ‘butchering’ it! It is really hard to ‘unlearn’ pronunciation and replace it with the correct pronunciation but your course is helping me to do so.

Thank-you again so very, very much, you have no idea how truly wonderful it is to have this course.

LINKS and RESOURCES!

“How to sound like a native French speaker” (my online pronunciation course): https://frenchyourway.teachable.com/p/how-to-sound-like-a-native-french-speaker

"What type of teacher do you have?": http://frenchyourway.com.au/type-of-teacher