l'alphabet français II : répétez !

Okay, so now you have listened to more French alphabet songs than you'd ever thought possible.  Enough listening!  You won't learn the sounds and the names of the letters until you get comfortable pronouncing them.  So clear your throat, take a long drink of eau, and try these out:

"Military-style French Alphabet": An English-speaking French teacher walks you through her version of the alphabet, set to the rhythm of a familiar military cadence ("I don't know but I've been told…").  This ten-minute video is very thorough and offers opportunities to practice single lines at a time slowly and then build up to saying the whole chant more quickly.

Watch this quick example first:

But this guy's cuter: Tom from easytolearnfrench.com is a young Frenchman who earnestly teaches Anglophone viewers how to say the French alphabet.  Do watch this too so that you hear a native speaker pronouncing the letter names:

Want to keep practicing but don't want to keep watching these same two videos over and over?  (Oui!)

These websites have simple pronunciation activities:

From Chillola.com, click on the letter and repeat:

From About.com, words that start with each letter to listen to and repeat:

This page from the BBC focuses on the trickier sounds for anglophones, including nasal vowels.  Strangely, it neglects to include U.  (My high school French teacher always told us to "round your lips as if you're going to say "ooooo" but then say "eeeee" instead.")

And, finally, here's another activity that reinforces on the vowel sounds, courtesy of hello-world.com:

Coming soon: l'alphabet français, part 3, which will feature games and apps about the alphabet….

A E I O U and sometimes Y (and sometimes L and W)

Griffin is a very vocal little guy. (Maybe sometime I will figure out how to take video footage off the camera and plunk it in the middle of a blog post so you can see him in action. Indulge me!) His sounds range from coos to shrieks of both joy and indignation to long blissful babbles. In addition to the expected screams and fussy cries, he also has a delightful laugh that can pull me out of a bad mood more quickly than Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Given my interest in linguistics and language acquisition, it's no surprise that I'm paying close attention to his baby noises. For the past month or so, I could swear that I've heard actual words, like when he said "Well, hello!" to me. And then there have been a couple of "la"s and even a "hi."

Yes, I know he's not even five months old yet and he's not really talking. This must be the baby equivalent of putting an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters (one of them will eventually pound out Hamlet): he makes enough different sound combinations frequently enough than some are bound to sound like real words.

But what this does show is that he's progressing beyond vowels--I do hear the odd consonant now and then, especially Ls, Ws, and Ys. If I were to take the time to dredge up some of my grad school notes, I suspect that I'd remember more about these phonemes known as "glides" or "semi-vowels" (they act like a vowel but sound like a consonant) and figure out why it makes sense that a toothless baby can produce them earlier than the other "real" consonants. But I'm too tired to do research right now! Anyone want to step in and take over?

By the way, I can't definitively say that any of Griffin's sounds seem French (like the four nasal vowels or the funky u) as opposed to English. But trust me, when he starts laughing smarmily like a mustachioed beret-wearing Frenchman with a baguette under his arm or intoning the foghorn-like phonemes in "un bon vin blanc," you'll be the first to know.