1.3 Dictation — writing what you hear — Epoché
What you will be able to do Take twenty French words from their pronunciation alone and write them correctly, marks and silent letters included. Supply a silent final consonant that you cannot hear, by reasoning from the word class and from the feminine form. Write the plural -s on a noun and the ending -ent on a verb although neither of them reaches your ear. Mark your own dictation, sort your mistakes into the three kinds that matter, and know which of the three to work on first. Prerequisites : 1.2 — you need the spelling-to-sound tables and the six sets of homophones, because this lesson runs the same machine backwards. See 1.2 Spelling if you need it. In a French school, dictation is a named exercise with a long history. The teacher reads a passage, the class writes it, the class is marked, and a mistake in agreement costs as much as a mistake in a word. English-speaking classrooms have a spelling test, which is a different animal: it asks you to reproduce a word you have studied. Dictation asks you to reconstruct, from a stream of sound, a written form that carries information the sound does not contain. That is the exact skill the previous lesson said could not be got from a rule, and dictation is how it is got. You are about to do one on your own, so a word about how to do that honestly. The problem with self-dictation is obvious: you cannot un-know the spelling of a word you are looking at. This lesson solves it by giving you the pronunciation in phonetic transcription and the meaning in English, and nothing else. You write the French. The transcription is not a crutch; it is the dictation, and reading it is the same work as listening, with the advantage that it will not go past you before you are ready. There is one more reason to take this seriously, and it is about learning rather than about examinations. Writing forces a decision on every letter. Reading lets you skate: you see a word, you recognise it as a whole, and you never notice that you do not know whether it ends in a t . Writing does not let you skate, which is why dictation can be a very effective way to learn spelling. Spelling to sound Before you run the machine backwards, check that you can still run it forwards. Here is the short form of the previous lesson. Read the sound column and say the words in the examples aloud; if any row surprises you, go back before you go on. Sound How it is usually written [e] é , or the endings -er and -ez : café , parler [ɛ] è , ê , ai , ei , or a bare e in a closed syllable: mère , tête , lait , mer [o] o , au , eau , ô : rose , aussi , chapeau [u] almost always ou : jour , beaucoup [wa] oi , and at the end of a word sometimes ois , oix , oit : moi , voix [ɑ̃] an , am , en , em : temps , enfant [ɛ̃] in , im , ain , ein , un : pain , demain [ɔ̃] on , om : crayon , maison [s] before a back vowel ç , or ss between vowels: garçon , poisson nothing at all a final -e , -s , -t , -d , -x , -p , or the whole ending -ent on a verb Read the right-hand column of that table and you can see the shape of the difficulty. The [u] row almost always has a single answer, and you can almost write it with your eyes shut. Several rows have four or five answers each, and no amount of listening will tell you which. And the last row is the worst: a sound that is not there at all, which you have to write anyway. The four questions to ask before you write a word Experienced writers of French do not guess; they run a short checklist, and it is short enough to internalise in a week. Ask these four questions in this order. First: which spelling does this vowel take in this word? There is no rule and you have to know, but you know more than you think. If the word is a cognate, the English relative often points at the answer: the French word for nation is spelled exactly like the English one, and the French word for university keeps the English letters up to the ending, where English writes -ity and French -ité . Where there is no cognate, treat the spelling as part of the word and learn them together. Second: is there a silent consonant at the end? Here you do have a method. Find a related word in which the consonant is audible, and if you find one, write it. The masculine adjective meaning small ends in a letter you cannot hear, but the feminine form ends in an audible one, so the letter is a t . The noun meaning time is harder, and that is the sort of word that has to be memorised, but the method solves a large majority of cases. Third: is this word plural? The plural marker is silent, so nothing in the word will tell you. The information is in front of it, in the article or the determiner, and sometimes only in the sense. If you heard the plural article, write the -s . Fourth: does anything here have to agree? An adjective agrees with its noun and a verb agrees with its subject, and in both cases the agreement is often inaudible. This is where French dictations are actually lost, and it is why the exercise counts as grammar and not as spelling. Notice that only the first of the four is memory. The other three are reasoning, and they are reasoning you can do slowly at first and quickly later. Start slow. Twenty words Cover the answers at the bottom of the page. Work down the list and write the French spelling of each word from the transcription and the meaning. Take your time on the ones with a silent ending, and use the checklist rather than your instinct. What you hear What it means [kafe] coffee [ʃa] cat [tabl] table [livʁ] book [fənɛtʁ] window [ʃɛz] chair [kʁɛjɔ̃] pencil [lɛtʁ] letter, of the alphabet or in the post [mo] word [ekut] the act of listening [nɥi] night [ʃapo] hat [wazo] bird [o] water [vwa] voice [pti] small, masculine [ptit] small, feminine [boku] a lot, much [tɑ̃] time; weather [il paʁl] they speak, masculine subject Four of those twenty are traps of a kind worth naming in advance. One of them is a word of one sound, and you have to produce three letters for it. Two of them are the same a