When I think about French pronunciation a phrase that frequently pops into mind is ‘lean in’, also the name of a book popular a decade or so ago advocating women to seize the opportunities in business and not wait to be invited to them. The better I hear French the more clear it seems that the back end of the word is where the attitude is generated; that’s where stress is applied, and that’s where the sound contour of the sentence is most shaped. It is most easy to grasp in 2 syllable words. Take the word, ‘normal’. In English the two syllables break as ‘NORM’ and ‘al’. While in French it goes ‘nor’ and ‘MAL’. In English the front side bosses while in French it is the back end that makes the deepest aural impression. That front to back difference in individual words shapes the sound contours of sentences, it is what makes French so different sounding to English despite the huge overlap in noun, verb, adjective and adverb roots. 3 and 4 syllable words are trickier. I have struggled mightily with nouns ending in ‘ion’, ‘télévision’ for example. Or ‘conversation’, identical in spelling except for an accent or two, but different beasts t-totally when it comes to pronunciation. The balance of stress across the syllables varies. In the ‘normal’ case, it is pronounced and clear cut – it goes to the guy at the back. However, in other words it is less clear cut, it is more of a linguistic balancing act, with a bias, hard to verbally pull off, towards the backend. As I continue my day to day repetition of sentences, the process of discovery and capture of pronunciation continues. I think perhaps I am learning to listen to the attributes of spoken sound for the first time. There is a lot going on, as there always is, when we map meaning, mood and moment to mode of communication. One group of French words I struggle with still, as mentioned above, and have for a long time, are those ending in ‘ion’. ‘Télévision’ ‘Situation’ ‘Conversation’, all words, and there are plenty more, that are identical or near identical to their English equivalent, with a similar of often identical meaning, but a pronouncedly different pronunciation profile, false friends as something analogous were called in another language I studied. Here my struggles are a combination of stress and sound reproduction. Something is going on in the middle before the final ‘cion’ sound that eludes. The ‘uat’ in ‘situation’ and ‘vis’ in ‘télévision’, it seems that the stress pivots delicately on the centre syllable before making a move on the final ‘cion’.
Another stress inducing stress complication in language is the unlearning of bad habits picked up earlier in the less informed stages of language acquisition. I spooner-like for years called ‘bokoo’ (beaucoup), ‘booko’, a mishap that carried unobserved into my first year of self-study. A number of corrections by my wife, a beneficiary of Canada’s more robust French language education, brought the error of my way to conscious realisation. It then took months of repetition to finally eradicate the mis-pronunciation from my linguistic habits. We spend a lot of time in our formative study mastering the auxiliary verbs, pouvoir, vouloir, aller, and so on. The result being, in my case at least, a tendency to over pronounce them in compound verbal phrases, where in fact, just as in English, the auxiliary verb is de-emphasised in favour of the operative verb more crucial for understanding. The sentence, ‘je me suis allé me coucher’. I tend to get focus on the ‘suis’ and ‘allé’ parts of the sentence, having spent that much time studying them, and as your focus goes so does your pronunciation stress, while, from what I hear, it is the verb ‘me coucher’ which brings the most meaning, and is at the back of the sentence, and thus the recipient of greater part of stress. And of course with verbs like aller, I, in the past, stressed the first syllable, incorrectly, and am now in an ongoing mission to correct myself and get it to the back where it belongs. Where once I pronounced ‘AL lai’, I am now working on ‘al LAY’. Similarly with common words, usually 2 syllable, earliest learned such as ‘beaucoup’ ‘aussi’, the mispronunciation of which is what gives the stereotypical god awful French pronunciation when spoken by Anglos. Think hammy Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds.