0.2 The vowels English does not have — /y/, /ø/, /œ/ — Epoché
What you will be able to do Hear and produce [y] , the vowel written u , and keep it apart from [u] , written ou . Produce the two vowels written eu — closed [ø] and open [œ] — and say which one a spelling will give you. Hold a rounded lip position while the tongue stays at the front of the mouth, which is the single physical trick behind all three sounds. Read a short sentence aloud without substituting an English vowel for a French one. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Plus tu étudies, plus tu sais. [1] The more you study, the more you know. Tout va bien. [2] Everything is fine. J'ai lu l'article. [3] I read the article. Attendons un peu. [4] Let's wait a bit. Prerequisites : 0.1 — you should already be able to split a sentence into breath groups and keep unstressed vowels unreduced — see 0.1 Sounds if you need it. English has a large vowel inventory, and that is usually an advantage when you learn another language: whatever the new language asks for, you probably already own something close enough. French is the exception. It has three vowels that standard English does not have, and they are not rare ornaments at the edge of the lexicon. They sit in the commonest words in the language — the pronoun for you , the word for a little , the numbers, the word for sister . You cannot route around them. The good news is that the difficulty is mechanical, not perceptual, and mechanical problems have mechanical fixes. All three sounds come from one gesture that English never asks you to make: round your lips while keeping your tongue forward . English rounds the lips only for back vowels, so your mouth has learned to treat rounding and backness as a single package. French unpacks them. Once you can separate the two, the three vowels arrive together and you have nothing else to learn about them. Why your mouth refuses at first Think about what your tongue does in the English word see . It is high and pushed towards the front, and your lips are spread, almost a smile. Now think about too . The tongue is high again, but pulled back, and the lips are pushed into a small circle. In English those two settings always travel together: front vowels come with spread lips, back vowels come with rounded lips. Most English vowels keep those two settings together: front vowels come with spread lips, back vowels come with rounded lips. Almost no English word asks for one without the other. French asks. Take the tongue position of see — front, high, unmoved — and then round your lips as if you were about to whistle or say too . Do not let the tongue slide back. That is [y], and it is the ordinary value of the letter u . The reason this feels impossible for a minute is that your ear has no slot for the result. Your brain receives an unfamiliar sound and files it under the nearest familiar one, which is [u], and then your mouth obligingly produces [u] instead. This is why practising by ear alone is slow and practising by lip and tongue position is fast. Watch yourself in a mirror, or watch your reflection in your phone screen. If your lips are rounded and your jaw is high and you feel your tongue tip pressing forward against the back of your lower front teeth, with the body of the tongue raised towards the hard palate, you are making the sound correctly, whatever your ear tells you. There is a second reason English speakers get this wrong that has nothing to do with the vowel itself. In English, the letter u very often stands for a glide plus a vowel: music , use , cute all have a [j] in front. French has no such glide here. The vowel begins immediately, with no consonantal onset, and adding the glide is one of the most recognisable markers of an English accent. The pair that matters most: u against ou French keeps [y] and [u] strictly apart, and the spelling keeps them apart too, which is a mercy: u is [y] and ou is [u], with almost no exceptions in the whole language. So the spelling tells you which sound to make. The problem is never knowing; it is doing. The pairs below differ in that one vowel and nothing else. Say each one twice, keeping your lips rounded and moving only your tongue between the two words — forward for the first, back for the second. [y] — tongue forward, lips rounded [u] — tongue back, lips rounded tu [ty] — you tout [tu] — everything rue [ʁy] — street roue [ʁu] — wheel vu [vy] — seen vous [vu] — you (plural, polite) su [sy] — known sous [su] — under plus [ply] — more flou [flu] — blurred nu [ny] — bare nous [nu] — we The first, third and sixth rows should worry you more than the others, because there the confusion is grammatical rather than merely lexical. Saying tout when you meant tu loses the pronoun for you ; saying vous when you meant vu puts a pronoun where a past participle should be; saying nous when you meant nu is a different kind of accident. This pair is not a pronunciation exercise that you can postpone until your grammar is better. It is part of the grammar. Here are the two vowels in real sentences from the corpus. Read each one aloud, slowly, and check with your fingers on your lips that you are rounding for both. French English Plus tu étudies, plus tu sais. [1] The more you study, the more you know. Tout va bien. [2] Everything is fine. J'ai lu l'article. [3] I read the article. The letter eu is two sounds The second gesture is the same trick applied one step lower in the mouth. Say the English word say and stop before the vowel starts to glide — you have a mid front vowel with spread lips. Round the lips without moving the tongue and you get [ø] , the closed sound written eu . Now open your jaw a little further, as if moving from say towards set , keep the rounding, and you get [œ] , the open one. English speakers often report that [ø] sounds like the vowel of her or bird . That comparison is useful for about thirty seconds and harmful afterwards. The English vowel there is central and