r/learnfrench • u/Gullible-Ask3890 • 14h ago
Question Please help me identify this book
Came across a reel teaching from this book, with a clickbait caption to find the free ebook in their bio, but then you don’t find it.
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u/Delicious-Honeydew77 14h ago
I don't know the title of this book, but does this way of transcribing French really help with pronunciation? Just asking
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u/skeletonpajamas 14h ago
It does if it’s correct. The phonetic spellings in the picture are wrong so it’s just going to make the speaker sound worse.
There’s a Lonely Planet series of pocket phrasebooks that I purchase whenever I visit a country for the first time. They have phonetic spellings that are good enough to get me in trouble because people assume I know more than I actually do.
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u/WildPyro_ 14h ago
I’m native so I’m definitely not the target, but this way of transcribing is well off the normal pronunciation. Tbf you could probably not do any better with English sounds but that’s precisely why it’s a terrible way to lean.
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u/Delicious-Honeydew77 14h ago
J'ai aussi essayé de prononcer avec cette transcription et j'avais un fort accent anglais ahah. Mais oui j'imagine qu'au moins c'est compréhensible et que ça évite de prononcer toutes les lettres muettes. Pourquoi tout le monde a peur de l'API?
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u/maaarken 8h ago
Legit c'est un beau guide pour apprendre à parler avec un accent anglo lol
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u/IcyPraline9987 7h ago
What would be wrong about having an English accent if you’re English though? I’m not trying to pretend I’m French, just communicate effectively.
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u/titoufred 4h ago
If you learn bad pronunciations then
1) A native will struggle to understand what you say.
2) You will struggle to understand what a native say.5
u/maaarken 7h ago
There's nothing wrong with it!
I was just joking that, as a francophone, I find it easier to mimic an anglophone accent reading from this (I'm usually very bad at mimicking accents)
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u/Longjumping_Cup8372 14h ago
Yes if you do not care about correct pronunciation and you need french for a trip to France for few days. But if you want to learn, it will make your learning harder, because you will need to correct your pronunciation later
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u/Actual_Cat4779 13h ago
I think that even if they wanted to avoid the IPA, they could perhaps come up with a better (or less awful) system, e.g. mwan could be mwan , or there's the version I saw in a British 'teach yourself French' book in the 1990s which was mwang (representing the similarity between English /aŋ/ and French /ɛ̃/ - though you have the risk that some English speakers could misread it as /aŋg/, but there was a key/guide in the introduction). IPA would be better, but a lot of people won't take the time to learn it.
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u/TheRrandomm 14h ago
This, why not just use the IPA
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u/CruserWill 13h ago
Most people don't know the IPA
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u/stefeu 13h ago
Really doesn't take long to learn the basics of it. Atleast enough of it to let you find out whatever you want to know via google.
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u/tuffykenwell 12h ago
Yeah there is even a wiki page for most of the major languages with audio for the sounds. Spending a few hours reviewing that and going throughThe Perfect French Pronunciation Course would be a way better use of time in my opinion.
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u/odimdavid 10h ago
Spotify has a lyrics tab where you can sing along to current musicians. You would be surprised what prononciation skills you could learn. And don't underrate kids channels with subtitles turned on. Speak along with the kids as they converse. You don't need to break a bank to practice current prononciation.
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u/Actual_Cat4779 12h ago
True, although I must admit it can be a bit confusing going back and forth between French orthography (<u> and <y>) and IPA (where /u/ and /y/ are each completely different sounds from their values in French orthography). Also, depending which accents you hear the most, IPA can be misleading, e.g. one would think that ɛ̃ was a nasalised ɛ, but in most parts of France its actual realisation is lower, nearer to a nasal a (different for Canada though).
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u/le-lutin 9h ago
I assume this (the image) is just for someone travelling to a country on holiday and needing to say a few phrases. I don't think the goal is to achieve fluency
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u/connka 6h ago
There are some versions of Creole that are kind of phonetic versions of other languages. Im not an expert by any means, but once I listened to a presentation on Haitian Creole and was shocked when I discovered I could understand them (I speak French). This might not be from Haiti, but could be another kind of Creole?
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u/AdventurousBee1421 1h ago
I’m ftom Québec and understand most of ehat is said in creole from Haïti.
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u/kiramishima 4h ago
It's rare jajaja, I learnt french but not like that book, I won't learn with that method
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u/Classic-Asparagus 1h ago
I think it could help someone who knows nothing about French pronunciation and has no access to a person who could teach them
Like sometimes my parents, who don’t speak any French, find something written in French online and try to tell me about it and ask me what it means by reading it out loud, but I have no idea what they’re saying because they don’t even know the most basic rules about French pronunciation. E.g. pronouncing que like kwé, pronouncing silent e or silent consonants, etc
But I think it would likely just make you sound like you have a heavy accent. Like this pronunciation reminds me of some people in my French classes who didn’t have the best pronunciation
I think IPA is good and has been beneficial for me in understanding how to pronounce things, but not everyone knows IPA or has the time to dedicate toward learning it
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u/almost_ready_to_ 9h ago
And why would you translate "moins vite" as "more slowly" instead of "less fast"? That seems to miss the opportunity to actually teach French.
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u/BigBlueMountainStar 8h ago
Just to reiterate what the other comment said in a different way, this seems to be very much a book aimed at tourist types who need to know what the French equivalent of the English phrase is, ie how the French say something specific, rather than an exact translation.
I would imagine that for “je m’appelle …” is translated to “my name is …” and not “I call myself …”10
u/le-lutin 9h ago
I think it's just a phrase book, so the goal isn't really to teach french. It's just to get by
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u/zac2130_2 4h ago
Because it's not a natural thing to say in english. Why did they translate "C'est quoi?" to "What is that?" and not "That is what?"
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u/RollinMonkey 13h ago
The way words are transcribed here is wrong. It would be more efficient to study some phonetics and use the phonetic alphabet to improve your pronounciation. It is time consuming at first, it's true, but at least you won't have to learn twice how to pronounce words. Learning the phonetic alphabet is a good investment of your time while learning French (and languages in general).
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u/le-lutin 9h ago
It's not more efficient if you're just going to France on holiday and want to say a few phrases
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u/United_Art_9520 5h ago
It would be far more productive to learn the IPA symbols associated with French phonology and learn to read words spelled that way.
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14h ago
[deleted]
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u/PantheraSondaica 13h ago edited 13h ago
It is "say" as in the English words "way", "bay", "lay". Not A as in French.
Edit: I know it is not actually a diphthong in French, the guide is supposed to be an approximation for English speakers. I was commenting: "there's no A", I didn't comment to say it is a good approximation or not.
If you say it like "See" as the comment above suggested, it will sound like French "si" instead, which is further away than "say" which is [eɪ̯].
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u/AdZealousideal9914 13h ago
No, in English "way", "bay", "lay" the "ay" is a diphthong [eɪ̯] while in French the "e" in "c'est" is a true monophthong [e].
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u/Actual_Cat4779 12h ago
Yes (although "say", "way" etc often have monophthongal [e:] in Yorkshire, but only a small minority of readers will have that accent).
"C'est" can also be pronounced with the monophthong [ɛ]. Perhaps the transcriber should have used "seh". Of course, there is no truly satisfactory way to transcribe French using English fauxnetics.
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13h ago
[deleted]
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u/thelouisfanclub 12h ago
I always thought it's closer to "seh" ... I never heard anyone say it "see"
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u/Sergent-Pluto 13h ago
We know, and it's wrong. If you pronounce "mwan" in English, you will pronounce the "n". Not in french, it's just a terrible way to try to represent a sound that just doesn't exist in English, this book isn't helping anyone.
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u/Sergent-Pluto 13h ago
That's so bad. To give an example to native English speakers it's like if I wrote a book for French speakers to learn English and I said that to pronounce "I think" you have to say "I sink" or "I fink", because "th" doesn't exist in french and there's no way to represent it properly.
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u/vivikto 14h ago
Wtf, that's bad.
"moins" = mwan?????
"mwan" would sound like "moine" in French, which means "monk". That's so fucking dumb.
Yeah, the sound "in" doesn't exist in English, so maybe instead of trying to make up something that doesn't sound like it at all, the authors should have thought "maybe this way of transcribing sounds isn't the best".
If only there was an international alphabet to write sounds of every language.
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u/Youdoyoubou 14h ago
I believe I have seen this account and it’s full of stolen videos from creators. Also what is that transcript?!
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u/NikhilDoWhile 14h ago
Google lens result:
This page belongs to the self-published language learning book series by content creator Fransiqo, which includes guides such as Real French and French Ready-Made Sentences.
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u/astr0dactyl 14h ago
I also would like the book. However the image/video in question is almost certainly AI generated.
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u/Lopsided-Scallion239 4h ago
Reminds me of the guide book given out to Allied soldiers during World War II to better navigate through France; useful phrases were translated phonetically for practical use, not necessarily to learn the language:
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u/freehany 14h ago
That's a bad book. The pronunciations provided under the French sentences are very false and bad.
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u/El_Hombre_Macabro 7h ago
Ah! Yes, especially since French is known for how well its pronunciation is represented in its own written form...
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u/Thick-Wolverine-4786 5h ago
French spelling is crazy, but it's consistent. I had to learn both English and French as a non-native speaker, and I much preferred the French one, because after a month of learning at least you could figure out how to read it aloud, if not to write it down when spoken. With English it was neither. But of course either Spanish, Italian, or most other languages are all easier.
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u/vendredi5 10h ago
With this abysmal "educating material" out there I actually have a shot at being a decent tutor. Thanks for showing me that!
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u/vendredi5 10h ago
Sorry for being snarky instead of helpful, I'm just stunned at how bad the pronunciation guide is. With plenty of resources on the internet that can read stuff out for you, and with the way everything can be easily connected with technology, writing stuff out like this just seems very backwards.
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u/Jovaniac 13h ago
I'm not a native English speaker or French but this seems pretty much helpful, it's easier to remember French with meme or something similar to English.
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u/Accomplished_Meat_81 12h ago
C’est is more like “Seh” (like Seth without the T)
Plaît is more like “play” without the “e” sound part of the Y pronunciation
And correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you pronounce the “e” in parle, right?
Either way, this is trash. Just learn the pronunciations of the alphabet the same way you learn English. The way they teach foreign languages to Americans is abysmal.
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u/PresidentOfSwag 14h ago
voolay voo kooshay ahvayk mwah suh swahr