[Originally posted on 06/18/14 on the Duolingo French for English speakers forum by aaditsingh8]
Hey everyone!
I don’t know if you all already knew this, but still!
This table shows the different pronunciations of the French Vowels, with the particular accents.
My other posts:
French Idioms and Popular Expressions
Selected comments on original post
Though that isn’t quite an equivalent, as the French “u” seems to be more like a combination “ee” and “oo” sound, which doesn’t exist in English.
There are some that aren’t exactly so, or maybe it’s only a difference between Canadian French (the one I speak natively) and France French.
I can certainly hear a difference between the ‘a’, ‘â’ and ‘à’ sounds. The first one (a ) sounds like the first a in animal. The second (â ) is a longer one and sounds like the example shown (card). The last one (à ) sounds a tiny bit higher than the a sound, like when we sing : “la la la“… (think about a young girl doing it)
There is also a good difference between ‘e’ and ‘eu’. The ‘e’ sound is made with the mouth slightly more open than the example shown (which is more or less correct for the ‘eu’ sound), this one is hard to explain.
aaditsingh8 [contributor]
It might be different because Canadian French is a bit more different from the French of France than usually dialects are. But I think the pronunciations you told are also correct, because in this table the pronunciation of similar vowels are shown.
Great! Thanks! I’ve added to this discussion if you don’t mind. It really completes the part about phonemes that is only in French so not as useful as I wanted to for an English speaker.
Duolinguists 