Practice Makes Perfect

se donnaient, se quittaient; les mêmes yeux, s’abaissant devant vous, revenaient se fixer sur  

les vôtres.

—Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)

Bonne chance à toutes et à tous!

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Appendix A  

French pronunciation

Beginning students of French usually have no difficulty writing the words they 

have learned, but find it hard to pronounce them. In French, numerous letters are 

silent and some represent sounds that do not exist in English. Depending on its 

environment within the word, one letter may have several different pronuncia-

tions, and one sound may have several different spellings. Although French uses 

the same alphabet as English, the rules of English pronunciation do not apply. The 

sounds that the letters of the alphabet produce in French are frequently quite dif-

ferent from those they produce in English.

To indicate how a letter or combination of letters is pronounced, the symbols 

of the International Phonetic Alphabet are often used, i.e., the letters are tran-

scribed phonetically. Phonetic transcriptions are always placed in square brackets. 

The word temps for example is transcribed [t3], the word homme [Om]. Note that 

silent letters (m, p, s in the first example, h and e in the second example) do not 

appear in phonetic transcriptions.

There are thirty-six phonetic symbols that represent the thirty-six sounds of 

the French language. If you learn these extremely useful symbols, and if you know 

which sounds they describe, you will be able to understand the transcriptions 

given in this book, and look up the pronunciation of French words in many 

dictionaries.

Consonants

Most of the symbols representing the consonants and half-consonants (or 

semi-vowels) are derived from the Latin alphabet that we use to write French and 

English.

 

 

FRENCH WORDS THAT  

ENGLISH WORDS THAT  

SYMBOL 

CONTAIN THIS SOUND 

CONTAIN A SIMILAR SOUND

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