What I Learned Today

I just got back from the first meeting of French 140, French Pronunciation, at Pasadena City College. What a blast! We read aloud books that French children use to learn to pronounce words, we carefully repeated vowel sounds, and we sang children’s songs (to work on proper intonation). I’m taking this class to improve my ability to speak the language (having had a nice grammar refresher in last semester’s French Translation class). And so far, truly, it’s pure fun! (I can’t say enough good things about Mme. Pedrini, our professor; I very much enjoyed her class last semester as well.)

I also learned some things today. (Yes, it’s true.) New words:

• bouée: life preserver
• dé: dice
• fusée: rocket
• mûre: blackberry
• pie: magpie
• pile: can
• requin: dolphin
• ruche: beehive
• usine: factory

In terms of pronunciation, I learned: “Vincent” contains two distinct vowel sounds (“ahn” and “ehn”). A single ‘s’ between two vowels is pronounced as an English ‘z’, but a double-s is pronounced ‘s’; for example, “choisissent” is “shwa-zees”. We also practiced breaking up sentences into units to allow you to lilt the intonation like a real French speaker… although this partitioning seems to be done more by intuition than by tangible rules (mostly breaking on phrase boundaries, though). Here is an example: “La femme de Pa-TRICK | habite à LILLE | avec son ma-RI.” TRICK and LILLE get up-intonation, while RI gets a down-intonation. After doing exercises like this for a while, it starts feeling very sing-song.

And then we launched into a real song, with music to accompany us!

Yes, imagine 29 people in a classroom at 9:30 p.m. singing along to this song. Excellent learning environment. :)