The Mimic Method

Speak a Foreign Language Like a Native

Common French Vowel Mistakes

As an English speaker you developed hearing and speaking patterns that clash with the French sound system. Fortunately, these tendencies are predictable and fixable once you become aware of them. With vowels, these four tendencies will account for 80% of your pronunciation errors so that’s why it gets its own page.

By understanding the things you’re inclined to do wrong, you can begin to make sense of these differences. Below, I categorize and explain all the major English vowel mispronunciation tendencies.

Tendency #1: “Diphthongizing” Vowels 

In English, diphthongizing is a fancy word meaning we add more sounds at the end of words as we close our mouths. For /o/ we glide it to a /u/ as in the word “hello!” (He-lo->u).  For /e/ we glide it to an /i/ as in the word “Hey!” (He->i). 
 
This does NOT happen in French. These sounds are short and sweet, with no additional vowels added on the end. The audio below demonstrates.

​Tendency #2: “Rounding” Vowels

When English speakers say the vowel /u/, they tend to curl their lips in at the end which alters the sound. To avoid doing this, you will want to keep these vowels short and crisp. Imitate the audio and try to build an awareness of this lip motion. 

Tendency #3: “R-Coloring” Vowels

Technically, French rhotic sounds are not vowels – they are consonants (you will learn about these later on). But it was worth including here because saying this incorrectly will vastly alter the sound of a vowel. Even more important, it is also one of the MOST common consonant speech sounds in the language. You may have a STRONG tendency as an English speaker to replace this French Uvular Consonant with the English /ɹ/ sound.​

This is called “R-coloring Vowels,” and it does NOT exist in French. R-coloring vastly alters the sound of a vowel. The main reason an English speaker would pronounce it this way in the first place is because she starts with a visual concept of the spelling. To prevent you from developing this same habit, this course uses the IPA symbol /ʁ/ to represent this sound. 

Again, you will learn more about the uvular consonant later in this course. For now, just listen to the difference between a vowel that is followed by an uvular fricative and a vowel that is “r-colored”.  

Tendency #4: Replacing Nasal Vowels With Nasal Consonants​

You will learn about Nasal Sounds later on in this course, but I wanted to include it here as well. You create “nasal” (nose) vowels when air passes through your nose and mouth at the same time. In contrast, you create nasal consonants when air passes ONLY through the nose. 
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For example, you make the /m/ consonant sound when you close your lips completely and let air escape through the nose. Similarly, you make the /n/ consonant when you place your tongue against the back of your gums and only let air escape through the nose.  

In English, we don’t often produce nasal vowels but we do produce nasal consonants like /m/ and /n/ quite often. As a result, when we hear nasalization in general, we have a tendency to perceive it as either an “n” or an “m” sound. So we have a tendency to create an /n/ or /m/ sound when trying to mimic nasal vowels.

​You will have a tendency to replace a nasal vowel with a combination of an oral vowel + nasal consonant (e.g. you would turn”ɔ̃” into “ɔn.” Your tongue and lips should be completely relaxed when making a French nasal vowels, and your mouth should always be open. The track below demonstrates the difference.

Like I said, these four tendencies will probably account for 80% of your pronunciation errors. If you can already do these with ease, you are in pretty good shape. But don’t fret if you aren’t there yet – that’s what the rest of this course is for.

For now, develop an awareness of these sounds and you can drop them from your speech patterns quickly. Be sure to return this page regularly as you improve your pronunciation.