Today we are dipping our toes into French pronunciation.

There are two important things to take into account when learning to pronounce French, and these are phonetics and spelling. I will give you the basics of both in this video.

Phonetics versus Spelling

Phonetics basically means how it sounds. In my advanced coaching program, the French Fluency Accelerator, there is a whole workshop about French phonetics, and you can even buy this one separately if you want to go deeper than we can in this video. The sound of French can be quite different from the sounds of English, so it’s helpful to practice pronouncing French. Here’s a whole playlist with little pronunciation tutorials.

Spelling French is a whole ‘nother can of worms. As you probably know, French has lots of silent letters, and sometimes uses several letters to make one sound. I’m currently working on a workshop about spelling, which will be available to my French Accelerator students soon.

In the meantime, let’s look at some examples right here.

“Bonjour” French pronunciation

You probably know that hello is in French, Bonjour. Literally good day.

Bonjour is spelled with 7 letters but has only 5 sounds: 3 consonants and two vowels. No letter is silent, but we have two Digrams: “on” forms the nasal “on”, and “ou” forms the vowel sound “ou”.

Then the letter J, always sounds like /j/ and the R at the end is the most dreaded French sounds, the RRRRR.

How to pronounce “Bonsoir”

Good evening is in French, Bonsoir.

Same story: 7 letters, 5 sounds, because we have two Digrams: ON for /on/ and OI for /wa/

S which is in the middle of a word and not between two vowels sounds like /ssss/

And finally the dreaded RRRR.

By now you probably realised that “bon” means good, but here’s a twist.

“Bonne nuit” pronunciation

Good night is “Bonne nuit” - please only say this if you are going to bed or the person you’re speaking to is.

We have “bonne” instead of “bon” because “nuit” is feminine.

What’s interesting here is that the nasal is gone. We just have “o”

Two Ns make the same sound as one N.

The E in bonne is silent. You can know it’s silent because it is the last letter and it has no accent.

The T at the end of nuit is also silent. Very often when a word ends with a consonnant, that consonnant is silent. One notable exception is the R, as you already know from Bonjour and Bonsoir.

How to address someone politely in French?

If you want to be polite in French, how do you address people?

We will learn how to pronounce 3 different honorifics = Madame, mademoiselle and monsieur.

In order to address someone with these honorifics, you need to know their gender. If someone is non-binary or you’re not sure about their gender, it’s better to refrain from using those. I have made this video about how to address gender diverse people respectfully in French

“Madame” pronunciation

First, if you’re addressing a woman, you can use Madame.

This is the easiest pronunciation we’ll learn today. Both As sound the same, as /a/. Ms and D are similar to English and the E at the end is silent, according to the rule we just learned with Bonne nuit.

How to pronounce “Mademoiselle”?

You might know that there is another female greetings = Mademoiselle.

Traditionally it was used for unmarried women. Nowadays it is almost abandoned but will sometimes be used to address young girls or very young women.

In mademoiselle you have the digram OI for /oi/ which we learned a moment ago in Bonsoir.

You have two silent Es, one at the end, and one in the middle. This one doesn’t have to be silent, you could say MadEmoiselle, but French people tend to speak faster and just gobble it. But then why is the middle E not silent, and how do we know it sounds like /è/, not something else?

First it would be very hard to pronounce none of the 3 Es.

Second, one E that is followed by a double consonant will always sound like è

Two Ls make the same sound as one L.

One /S/ squeezed between two vowels makes the sound /Z/

So, all together, it’s Mademoiselle

How to pronounce “Monsieur”?

I kept the worst for last: Monsieur.

Sometimes NONE of the things you’ve learned can actually help you guess the pronunciation from the spelling. The issue is that the spelling of French was fixed several centuries ago, while the pronunciation continued to evolve. And so words that were used very often by millions of speakers over centuries now sound very different from how they’re spelled. The spelling will only remind you of the ethymology. Just like madame means “my lady”, “monsieur” means “my sir” and you can kind of see that in the spelling, but not at all in the pronunciation. You can only learn to pronounce it phonetically, I can’t break it down for you, so, repeat after me: Monsieur.

Congratulations on surviving until now! If you like this way of learning using patterns and rules, make sure you subscribe to this channel, because there’s a lot more where this came from.

Here is a playlist with many little pronunciation tutorials, and here are the 7 keys that you need to use to become a fluent French speaker.

Your next steps

If you like this way of learning French, you will love to learn with me as a student or client. Please check out:

My 1-1 coaching program, The French Transformation, if you need to improve your French fast.
My group program, The French Fluency Accelerator, if you’d like to join a community of students from all over the world. We have weekly practice calls together and the best online video library to learn French.