0.1 Rhythm and stress — French stresses the phrase, not the word — Epoché
What you will be able to do Hear that French stresses the end of a phrase , not a syllable inside a word. Split a French sentence into phrases (one breath each) and put the push on the last syllable of each. Stop carrying English word stress into French, and hear yourself doing it when you slip. Count syllables in a French word and notice that they usually end in a vowel. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Je ne comprends pas. [1] I don't understand. Je suis arrivé à Nagoya tôt ce matin. [2] I reached Nagoya early this morning. Vous aimez chanter ? [3] Do you like singing? Prerequisites : none. This is the first lesson of the course. Before any letter or any rule of grammar, this lesson asks one question: what unit does French move in? For a speaker of English that question matters more than it looks, because English and French disagree about it in a way that no amount of vocabulary will fix later. You can already read a lot of it — that is the trap English borrowed from French for four centuries. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the words in a large English dictionary came in that way, and thousands of them are still spelled almost identically. Look at these and you will understand every one: French English important important possible possible nation nation restaurant restaurant table table animal animal We will come back to this in the Cognates volume and turn it into rules you can use. For now notice only the danger in it: you recognise the word on the page and then say it in English. important is not im-POR-tant . restaurant is not RES-tron . The letters are shared; the rhythm is not. Reading French is cheap for you. Saying it is not, and this lesson is about why. English pushes a syllable inside the word Say the English word important and listen to where the loudness sits. It sits on -por- . Now move it: IM-por-tant . The word stops being a word; it becomes a mistake. English stress is part of a word's identity. It is stored in your memory with the vowels, and it is the reason PHO-to-graph , pho-TO-gra-pher and pho-to-GRAPH-ic sound like three different things while sharing a stem. English also uses stress to change meaning outright: a REcord is a thing and to reCORD is an action; INsult against inSULT ; PREsent against preSENT . Dozens of pairs work like that. So for you, stress is lexical: it belongs to the word. In French it does not. A French word, said on its own, has a light push on its last syllable and nothing else to remember. And once the word goes into a sentence, even that push usually disappears, because the unit that carries the push is bigger than the word. French pushes the end of a phrase French groups words into what is called a groupe rythmique — a rhythmic group, roughly what you can say in one breath without a break. The last syllable of the group gets a small lengthening and a small rise or fall. Everything before it is flat and even. Take a short sentence from the corpus: French English Je ne comprends pas. [1] I don't understand. Five syllables: je–ne–com–prends–pas . An English speaker reading it aloud almost always pushes com-PRENDS , because that is where the stress would go in an English-shaped word. A French speaker pushes pas — the end of the group — and keeps the first four syllables at the same level. Nothing inside gets promoted. Now a slightly longer one, where the sentence splits into two groups: French English Je suis arrivé à Nagoya tôt ce matin. [2] I reached Nagoya early this morning. The natural break is after Nagoya : Je suis arrivé à Nagoya | tôt ce matin . Two groups, so two pushes: on -ya and on -tin . Not on a-RRI- vé , not on MA-tin . If you want one rule from this lesson, it is this: find the end of the breath, push there, and flatten everything else. This is also why French can sound, to English ears, as though it has no stress at all, or as though every syllable is equally important. Both impressions are near the truth. The evenness is the point. Syllables, and why they end in vowels English syllables like to end in consonants, and it likes to pile them up: strengths is one syllable with three consonants at the front and four at the back. French avoids that. Its syllables prefer to end on a vowel, and when a consonant would close a syllable, French often hands it forward to the next one instead. Say une amie (a friend, feminine). Written, it looks like une + amie . Spoken, the n moves across: u–na–mie . Three syllables, all ending in a vowel. This is called enchaînement , and it is one reason you cannot hear where one French word stops and the next begins — the boundaries you are looking for have been deliberately smoothed over. Lesson 0.4 Sounds takes up its close relative, liaison. Counting practice matters here, so count out loud as you read: French Syllables merci 2 — mer / ci bonjour 2 — bon / jour madame 2 — ma / dame important 3 — im / por / tant restaurant 3 — res / tau / rant université 5 — u / ni / ver / si / té Notice université : five even syllables with a light push on - té . In English, university has a heavy -VER- in the middle and three reduced vowels around it. That reduction is the other half of the problem, and it is the next thing to fix. English reduces unstressed vowels; French does not Because English promotes one syllable, it demotes the rest. The unstressed vowels collapse towards the schwa [ə]: the first vowel of about , the second of sofa , the middle of chocolate . You do this constantly and without noticing. French does not. Each syllable keeps its full vowel quality. téléphone is [te.le.fɔn] — three clean vowels, not TEL-ə-fəʊn . chocolat is [ʃɔ.kɔ.la], three clean vowels, not CHOC-lət . When an English speaker's French is hard to follow, reduction is usually the reason: the listener is waiting for vowels that were swallowed. So the instruction is mechanical. Give every syllable the same length and the same care