French Alphabet and Pronunciation|How to Type Them (2023)

FAQs

What are the 26 letters of the alphabet in French? ›

The Alphabet in French

a, b, c, d, e f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o ,p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.

et. “Et” was the 27th letter of the alphabet. And actually, you can still find it on your keyboard! Now most people call this character an “ampersand” or simply “and”, but this character was actually considered a letter!

The letter K is pronounced similarly in French and English, and is identical to the hard French C. Phonetic symbol: [k]. K is quite rare in French – it's found mainly in words borrowed from other languages.

Pronouncing the French Letter 'T'

The letter 'T' in French is fairly straightforward as it is pronounced more or less like the English 'T. ' The difference is that in French, it is pronounced with the tongue against the upper teeth, rather than behind them, as in the English T.

With the right amount of motivation and commitment, a healthy learning habit, plus the right tools and method to guide you, yes you can teach yourself French. As a French teacher for many years, I've come across a lot of people who would rather spend time learning a new language by themselves.

FluentU (Android/iOS)

Not only do you get to see the language used naturally, but you also get to hear native pronunciations of every word. Anywhere that you see a word, you're able to check its definition, hear an audio pronunciation and see the word used in other videos.

Is Z no longer A letter? ›

Clearly there's good news for all the zebras and zither lovers out there, though. Z made its way back to the alphabet so kids could learn an alphabet that stretched all the way from A to Z. Two hundred years after Appius Claudius Caecus was giving the letter the boot, Z was reintroduced to the Latin alphabet.

The letter z (Z uppercase) is the last letter, thus nothing comes after z.

The English Alphabet consists of 26 letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

Å is pronounced like the English O in “or,” the Swedish Ä sounds almost like the word “air” in English, and Ö has a similar pronunciation to the [er] sound in the word “her.”

A cedilla is a symbol that is written under the letter 'c' in French, Portuguese, and some other languages to show that you pronounce it like a letter 's' rather than like a letter 'k'. It is written ç.

The French r is nothing like the English r (pronounced in the middle of the mouth) or the Spanish r (pronounced in the front of the mouth). The French r is pronounced in the throat. The French r sounds a lot like the ch sound in "Loch Ness" and the kh in Arabic transcription, as in Khalid.

Cedilla: ç

The little hook ¸ added under the letter c in French is a diacritical mark known as a cedilla, une cédille. The letter c with the hook ç is called c cédille. The sole purpose of the cedilla is to change a hard c, pronounced [k], to a soft c, pronounced [s].

The French alphabet is based on the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, with five diacritics and two orthographic ligatures. The letters ⟨w⟩ and ⟨k⟩ are rarely used except in loanwords and regional words.

Ç always sounds like [“sss”] !

So it's a way to have a “c” letter that sounds like “sss” even in front of a / o / u. For instance: A : Ça = [sah] = “this” ; Français = [fransay] = French!

Ë with diaeresis is the easiest case to deal with. The diaeresis (the two dots) signifies that the underlying “e” is pronounced as /ɛ/ (as “e” in “bet”, i.e. the open e), no matter what comes around it, and is used in groups of vowels that would otherwise be pronounced differently.

Why do French not say r? ›

French R Vs Spanish R

The French R sound is produced at the back of the mouth, where you'll pronounce the G of “get” in English. In France, the French R is never the Spanish rolled R, nor is it the very guttural Spanish J as in Jesus.

Why is the final “s” in Paris silent? The final “s” in Paris is typically silent because it's part of a group of words called “liaison words.” Liaison words are French words that end in a consonant but are followed by a word that begins with a vowel.

While you certainly won't master it in three months, especially if you can only put a few hours a week into it, you can make sure to be more efficient by following an initial plan of action. Let's take a look at what you should do in the first hour, first day, first week and first month of learning French.

The FSI scale ranks French as a “category I language”, considered “more similar to English” compared to categories III and IV “hard” or “super-hard languages”. According to the FSI, French is one of the easiest languages to learn for a native English speaker.

It will take approximately 580 hours or 23 weeks of study to reach complete French fluency. Which we could break down as the following: If you study for 1 hour every day, you can learn French in 1.5 years. If you spend 6 hours every day learning French, you can learn it in less than 100 days.

The reality is that there's a lot of material you'll need to cover to learn French in 30 days. However, don't be overwhelmed. Take it day-by-day, and re-adjust your learning plan every so often if you have to.

Serrurerie

Brace yourself: The hardest French word to pronounce is the word for locksmith – “serrurerie“. It was the most commonly repeated response.

Compared with Parisians, Southern French people speak French at a slower rate, which can make it seem easy to understand.

What is the hardest French accent to understand? ›

#1 Parisian French

Of the accents of France, the Paris accent is perhaps the hardest to nail down. And that's because Parisian French is considered “standard French” – or French without an accent.

Latin alphabet, also called Roman alphabet, the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and the languages of most of Europe and those areas settled by Europeans.

The letter A is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph—a western Semitic word referring to the aforementioned beast of burden. Aleph can be traced back to the Middle Bronze Age and the Proto-Sinaitic script found in parts of Egypt and Canaan from around 1850 BCE (Before the Common Era).

It wasn't until 1524 when Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian Renaissance grammarian known as the father of the letter J, made a clear distinction between the two sounds.

In French, soixante (60) is the last iteration of ten to have its own word. Going higher, such as seventy is soixant dix (60-10), eighty is quatre vingt (4-20), 90 is quatre vingt dix (4-20-10). What's with this?

Il est treize heures quarante-cinq = it's 13:45. Il est vingt heures = it's 20:00.

Although French is derived mainly from Latin (which accounts for about 60% of English vocabulary either directly or via a Romance language), it also includes words from Gaulish and Germanic languages (especially Old Frankish).

How is 13 pronounced? ›

Thirteen. Thirteen beings with the unvoiced TH sound, so the tongue must come through the teeth, th, thir-. It then has the 'ur' as in 'her' vowel sound, thir-, so the tongue pulls back, fattens up, and raises some, thir-.

Hence the decimil 1.5 is written 1,5 and read as 'un vigrule cinq'.