Slide 1 : French online classes by a native speaker « Le français tel qu’on le parle… »… Jean-Marie
Slide 2 : L’alphabet français se compose de 26 lettres dont 6 voyelles et 20 consonnes
A B C D E F G H I J K L M
N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
The French alphabet has the same 26 letters as in English, which are obviously pronounced differently. Besides, French has five accents : four for vowels and one for a consonant.
Slide 3 : French accents There are four French accents for vowels
- l’accent aigû (acute accent é) on the letter e ( ex : un étudiant (a student), une école (a school), une épine (a thorn)
- l’accent grave (grave accent è à ù) on the letters e, a or u (on a and u, it serves avoiding homographs as ou (or) and où (where)
- l’accent circonflexe (circumflex) on the letters a, e, i, o, u . In old French, people wrote an s after the vowel like in « fenêtre » (une île : in old French= une isle = an island) It is also used to avoid homographs such as du ( as a contraction of de + le) and dû (past participle of devoir = idea of obligation)
- l’accent tréma ¨ (dieresis) on ë, ï and ü. We use the trema when 2 vowels are next one to the other, and must absolutely be pronounced such as un caïman, ovoïde.
and one accent for a consonant.
- la cédille (cedilla) only used on the letter ç. It modifies the hard sound of C like an S, as in « un garçon » a boy.
Capital letters are not accented.
Slide 4 : How to type French accents
on your keyboard ? There are different ways to type these accents, no need to have a special software for that.
Among many, here is a very simple way to write in correct French with all the different accents.
Just have always at hand this useful site
http:french.typeit.org
What you just need is to type your text in the box, and then copy and paste on your document.
The main advantage of this site is that you can use it for other languages than French.
Slide 5 : Sounds in French may sound a little queer to your ears, so I believe the following link will be useful to understand how it works :
http://phonetique.free.fr/indexphonvoy.htm
My advice is to use as many as possible the different exercises.
Just because you must train your ears to these foreign sounds. ASSOCIATION OF SOUNDS Frejus city Hall