French

Most French pronunciation guides are really only about pronunciation rules for the language. They tend to fall short of teaching you how to actually hear and pronounce said sounds.

Here at The Mimic Method, our mission is to help bridge the cross-cultural gap between people and inspire real human connection. If you’re the kind of person who wants to make real long-term relationships in another language, this is the place for you. We do this by teach unique pronunciation method through mimicry.

By the end of this pronunciation guide, you should be familiar with most of the sounds associated with the different combinations of the French alphabet. You will even discover a few tricks to overcome things like the dreaded ‘throaty’ R sounds.

Although there are many rules and spellings, French is quite a regular language. Yet many times the letters and combinations of letters will sound different than how they are written. Luckily, except for a few words here and there, almost all French words will follow certain patterns and rules. Read on to learn more.

In my last post, I posted a video of me rapping my first full verse of French.  In accordance with The Mimic Method philosophy, the purpose of this activity is to train the motor memory in my speech organ so that I can produce French sounds at normal speeds.

Before I could rap in French, however, I needed to familiarize myself with its component sounds, or phonemes.  Every language has its own phonetic menu, or list of possible sounds.  In the case of “Standard French”, there are roughly 36 different items on the menu.

This may sound like a lot to digest, until you start to cross off the sounds that already exist in English.  Of the 36 French sounds, 27 already exist in English.  From a learning perspective this makes things much easier.
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In this video, I teach myself the song “Soul Pleurer” (“Soul Cry”) by the Old School French Rap group from Montreal – Dubmatique.

My personal approach to language learning is really quite simple.

1. I familiarize myself with the component sounds (phonemes) of the language.
2. I use Rhythmic Phonetic Training to teach myself the lyrics of rap songs to hone my mimicry skills.
3. I immerse myself in the language and learn through mimicry.

In future videos, I will show you exactly this last step of mimicry actually goes down in practice. I will also discuss how I went about the first step of familiarizing myself with the component sounds of French.

I figured no one would want to hear what I had to say about language and learning until I had proven that my ideas were worthwhile. I mean who would ever believe some crazy guy who talks about the virtues of rapping in foreign languages?

As it turns out, quite a few people have found the idea compelling. A growing number of people are trying out my Flow Series courses to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French and even English!

But now that people are starting to really feel the Flow of their target languages, I’ve been getting a lot of emails from students similar to this: