French sounds: textbooks for learning French phonetics
My recent Instagram poll showed that almost 100% of people who voted found French sounds very difficult. I won't argue with that. I once thought so myself.
As foreign-language students, we struggled through this tough subject armed with Popova and Kazakova’s textbook and its phonetics course — the first 18 lessons of everyone’s ‘favourite’ textbook. I once wrote about it here here.
I am sure that many people still choose this path of the “hero”.
For those who have taken on French phonetics on their own, Russian textbooks seem like a godsend - after all, all the explanations are in Russian. True, this does not always make it clearer what we are talking about. And as for me, it’s all quite boring and not about fun if you go from lesson to lesson alone, without a teacher, and take only the material that the black and white textbook gives.
French publishing houses have not been sitting still for a long time and are releasing more fun books:
- Phonétique progressive du français from the publisher CLE (for levels Débutant A1; Intermédiaire A2/B2 and Avancé B2/C1)
- Phonétique en dialogue also from CLE (for entry level)
- Les 500 exercices de phonétique avec corrigés from Hachette (for levels A1/A2 and B1/B2)
Yes, these textbooks are entirely in French. But if you are able to navigate the table of contents, then it will not be difficult for you to open the desired page and work out exactly what you have difficulties with. And this is logical. It doesn't always make sense to perfect every French sound unless you plan to become a linguist teacher. In most cases, it is enough just to know its features and over time, in practice, this sound will “stand up” on its own.
As it is written in the French textbooks on phonetics in the preface - “depending on your native language, you will have your own specific difficulties with French phonetics”. And then there are tips on what exactly you need to work on first if you speak Russian or English. A little later I will write about this too.
Read other articles:
French phonetics: practising sounds with songs