One of the first things new French learners notice early on is just how hard the language is to understand. It’s not obvious to most French learners why this is; only that French seems to become significantly harder when it moves from words on a page to words coming out of another person’s mouth.
This problem isn’t completely unique to French, though. Pretty much all language learners report that the spoken language is harder to understand than the written language (even Chinese and Japanese learners often agree). The consensus among some language learners is that, it’s not that the language you were unfortunate enough to choose is particularly hard to understand, it’s that all languages are hard to understand. And while I partially agree with this, I actually do believe that French is uniquely hard to understand in ways that other languages are not.
To start off, in French we have what are called ‘nasal vowels’. These are vowels like a,e,i,o,u, but that are pronounced mainly by pushing air out of your nose instead of your mouth. You can hear each of the four main nasal vowels in the sentence Un bon vin blanc (meaning: a nice white wine).
Nasal vowels are especially hard for English speakers like myself because, well, our language doesn’t exactly have any. One example of a nasally English word is "sing" where the ‘ng’ at the end is pronounced mainly through the nose. But even that analogy is a bit of a stretch.
French having sounds that don’t exist in English is one thing, but it also doesn’t help that these sounds (while in fact distinct) actually sound very similar when pronounced. To new learners ‘son’ and ‘sans’ may sound approximately the same while the sounds ‘in’ and ‘un’ are so similar that they are even merging into a single indistinguishable sound in some regions of France.
Next, we have what’s referred to as ‘liaison’ in French. While the concept may sound fancy or complicated, ‘liaison’ just means ‘linking’ or ‘connection’. It’s the phenomena of how French words will sorta bleed into each other; how one word becomes connected to the next one.
To explain liaison, I’ll use the following example: Vous êtes en état d’arrestation (meaning: you are under arrest).
If we were to pronounce each of the first three words by themselves, their respective pronunciations would have been:
But, when linked together, they become
So, "Vous-êtes-en-état d'arrestation".
The reason those words changed here is because each of the words that came right after started with a vowel. If the sentence were instead “Vous venez de Paris” (You’re from Paris?), because “venez” starts with a consonant, the “Vous” that came before it would be pronounced “voo” again, not "vooz".
Why the French language has this feature, I have no idea, but what’s for certain is that this feature of the language makes it much harder for learners to tell when one word ends and the next one begins.
Closely related to liaison is “elision” which is when one word is cut short and then merged into the next one. I asked ChatGPT to give me an example of a sentence that uses lots of elision and got the following: L’homme qu’on a vu à l’hôtel n’a rien dit (the man that we saw at the hotel didn’t say anything).
In this sentence, you can see where the elisions are by looking at the apostrophes ( ‘ ).
We can actually further break this sentence down into what it would’ve been without the elisions to get the following:
Le homme que on a vu à le hôtel ne a rien dit.
Which shows that
And so just like liaison, elision also makes it hard to hear when one word ends and the next one begins.
The last aspect of French I’d like to talk about is its intonation. Compared to other languages, French is remarkably flat and monotone. In English we have stress, in Chinese, they have tones and in Japanese, there’s pitch accent.
If you’re not familiar with what stress is in English, it’s the syllable that you emphasize in each word. For example, "tomorrow” is pronounced "toMOrrow", not "tomoRROW" or "TOmorrow". There’s also the sentence “I present to you my present” where the first present is pronounced "preSENT" and the second one is "PREsent".
Chinese doesn’t have stress but instead has tones where the tone of each syllable will either go up, go down, stay flat or go down then back up again. And in Japanese, there’s pitch accent where each syllable is either pronounced with a low pitch or a high pitch and each word has its own unique pitch pattern.
But “what does French have?”, you might be wondering. Well, none of those. It doesn’t have stress, tones, pitch accent or even syllables that are held longer than others.
Now you may think that the lack of intonation in French would make it easier to learn, and in some ways it does, but it also makes the language a lot harder to understand. Imagine, for example, if I waved a magic wand and made stress disappear completely from English. Do you think that would make English easier to understand? What about if we got rid of tones in Chinese?
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If we now combine all of the above, we get a nasally language that systematically chops up and strings its words together and is, on the whole, kinda flat. It’s not particularly surprising then that people learning this language would complain that it’s hard to understand. This language is basically the phonetic equivalent of messy handwriting.
But there is a bright side to this. A language with these qualities is also a language that is soft on the ears, flows poetically and sounds sorta …romantic?
Ironically, what makes the French language so hard to understand might also be what makes it so beautiful.