English → French
French uses 36 sounds. You already own 19 of them from English. The other 17 are the work — and 16 of those are the dangerous kind: close enough to something you already say that you will substitute them without hearing yourself do it.
The silent swaps
Your mouth has something close enough to reach for. These survive for years precisely because they sound right to you — the fix is hearing the difference first, not trying harder.
the move: close, but not identical
French: eight · written "u+vowel"
Say /y/ and glide into the next vowel. nuit, lui, pluie.
Your /w/ is the one in water (water).
the move: velar → palatal
French: mountain · written "gn"
Your /ŋ/ is the one in sing (sing).
the move: near-open → open
French: cat · written "a", "à"
Your /æ/ is the one in cat (cat).
the move: near-close → close
French: bed · written "i", "î", "y"
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-close → close
French: day · written "ou", "où", "oû"
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
the move: close, but not identical
French: dough · written "â"
Merging with /a/ for most younger speakers.
Your /ɑː/ is the one in car (car).
the move: rounded
French: fear · written "eu", "œu (closed syllable)"
Your /ɛ/ is the one in bed (bed).
the move: close, but not identical
French: door · written "o + consonant"
Your /ɔː/ is the one in law (law).
the move: close, but not identical
French: child · written "an", "am", "en", "em"
Your /ɒ/ is the one in hot (hot).
the move: close, but not identical
French: bread · written "in", "im", "ain", "ein"
Your /ɛ/ is the one in bed (bed).
the move: close, but not identical
French: good · written "on", "om"
Your /ɔː/ is the one in law (law).
the move: rounded
French: brown · written "un", "um"
Parisians merge it into /ɛ̃/: brun = brin.
Your /ɛ/ is the one in bed (bed).
the move: near-close → close-mid
French: summer · written "é", "-er", "-ez", "es (les, des)"
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-close → close-mid
French: water · written "o (final)", "ô", "au", "eau"
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
the move: near-close → close, rounded
French: you · written "u", "û"
Round your lips for /u/, say /i/. NOT English 'oo'.
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
Words you may say identically
Two or more French sounds landing on one sound of yours. Until the ear separates them, the mouth cannot — which is what the ear trainer is for.
Genuinely new
Nothing in English sits close to these. They sound foreign in your mouth — which is the good news: you can hear that you are not saying them yet.
street
Uvular — at the back, like a light gargle. Never rolled at the tip.
Closest thing you own: — but labiodental → uvular.
Rhythm and pitch
The layer spelling never records, and the one that makes a correct sentence still sound foreign.
| English | French | |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythm | Stress-timed | Syllable-timed |
| Stress | Contrastive, and unmarked in writing — the single most common cause of not being understood. Dozens of noun/verb pairs differ only in where the stress goes, and every unstressed vowel collapses to /ə/. | This is the one that surprises everyone: French words have NO fixed stress. Prominence lands on the last syllable of the rhythmic GROUP, not of the word — so the same word is stressed differently depending on where it sits. 'Un chocolat' stresses -lat; 'un chocolat chaud' moves it to chaud and the word chocolat loses it entirely. There are no French minimal pairs by stress, because there is nothing to contrast. |
What you have that French doesn't
24 sounds with no job in French. They are not mistakes — but they are where an accent leaks in, because a sound you own is easy to use when a hard one is due.
The honest caveat
This is a prediction from the shape of two sound systems, not a recording of you. It says what your inventory makes likely — it cannot know that your English has a regional variety that already owns one of these, or that you learned French from someone whose accent you copied. A teacher listening to you beats it. Use it to know what to listen for.
Other first languages: Spanish · Portuguese · German · Italian · Georgian · Russian · Hindi · Mandarin Chinese · Cantonese · Vietnamese · Korean · Japanese · Malay · Turkish