LEARN FRENCH

CHAPTER 1



English and French are using the same alphabet; even better English and French are using several hundred words that have the same spelling and meaning in both languages.
Here are one hundred examples!

rage, bandit, banquet, Bible, bizarre, boulevard, avenue, bracelet, budget, capable, capital, torture, tradition, train, triple, type, union, urgent, vacant, vague, vengeance, zone, information, conversation, menace, minute, municipal, muscle, nation, national, lion, indulgent, installation, inspection, instrument, grain, horizon, imitation, humble, final, fortune, golf, motion, existence, durable, date, destruction, construction, dispute, docile, contact, concentration, cage, canal, canon, cigarette, client, code, colonel, combat, art, article, aspect, pigeon, portrait, biscuit, circuit, piano, rail, rural, air, plateau, change, orange, tribunal, taxes, fruits, assassin, absence, accent, accident, accusation, acquisition, action, adoption, affection, agent, agriculture, album, alliance, allusion, ambition, amusement, anecdote, angle, animal, aptitude, volume, tunnel, style, sublime.

You might assume from this that you have less to learn than you anticipated. In a way it is true for if you did see these words in writing you would guess correctly their meaning. However if you only heard them you probably would not recognize them because their French pronunciation is very different from the English one.
> Now listen to the following words and see (or rather hear) for yourself:

Durable, date, destruction, muscle, change, national, lion, indulgent, installation, amusement, anecdote, angle, combat, art.

Therefore you need to be able to associate a spelling - you might be familiar with - with a new sound. In this book we are going to use terms such as sound, syllable, stress and intonation. It is important you understand exactly what they mean.
What is a sound?
In languages there are two kinds of sounds consonant sounds (p,t,k,b,d,g,f,v,s,z, etc…) and vowel sounds ( a e i o u ).

A word like in has two sounds: (the vowel /i/ + the consonant /n/),
bean has three sounds (/b/ + /ea/ + /n/),
pinned has four sounds (/p/ + /i/+/n/ + /d/),
skilled has five sounds (/s/ + /k/ +/i/ + /l/ + /d/)