Some brightness for your weekend. Enjoy! Photo taken in Paris.
Beautifully renovated and decorated home in the Luberon. 4 bedrooms and a study with a sofa bed, each with ensuite (full) bath. This villa comfortably sleeps 7-9 adults.
What are the hardest French words to pronounce?
Longtime reader, Hampton, forwarded me an article from The Local listing Ten French Words You’ll Never Pronounce Right, including mille-feuille, pneu, grenouille, and serrurerie.
Eep! Tell me about it!
Hampton suggested I get Jean-Marc or Jackie or Max to pronounce these tongue tricky words. But because my family is away at the moment, I thought you and I could make our own list, here, and then have our resident Francophones choose ten of them to record. Sound good? Are you chiche, or up for it? I am–I can’t WAIT to know which words you find difficult to pronounce.
Allons-y! Lets go!
Tell us what are the hardest French words to pronounce. Click here.
As for me, I cannot for the life of me say the word TRUFFE. Don’t believe it? Here goes: Download MP3 or Download Wav
Truffe! J’adore manger les truffes!
Truffles. I love to eat truffles!
(Did you hear Jean-Marc laughing in the background? “Pourquoi tu le prononce comme ça?” he says.) CLICK HERE to tell us which French words are hardest to pronounce.
SABLET HOME for high quality vacation rentals in the heart of Provence. Particularly suited to groups of up to four discerning travelers: www.sablethome.com
If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve seen the rest of these photos and stories by now…
The Little French Seamstress. Celebrating with my 17-year-old in Cassis, after she was accepted for a second internship (this one in Marseilles). Jackie will be apprenticing for a Tunisian-French woman who once sewed uniforms for the French military and now runs her own business from her tiny living room. Sales recently took off when same sex marriage became legal in France. “It’s fun designing for grooms,” she says. Should be a great experience for Jackie.
Fig trees, olive trees, and umbrella pines, below. In the center, a stone cabanon; the new red door has many past lives: it floundered for a time at the junk store, then moved to a wall inside our house. Next it filled in a gap below our kitchen window. We then moved, taking the old red door (really a shutter) along with us to Bandol, where it found purpose as a gate on the dog run….only to become a foot bridge between unlevelled land. Last week we dusted it off and leaned it gently against the little stone cabanon. I think it finally found a home!
COMMENTS welcome here, and don’t forget to mention which word you have the most difficulty saying in French. Merci et bon week-end!
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It’s silly but I struggle a lot with Au Revoir. A lot!
“Ecureuil” – squirrel. Not only do I stumble in pronouncing it, I always forget how to spell it, adding extra “u”s and “r”s and “e”s. And the darn things are all over our Vermont back and front yards!
Great post, Kristin.
écureuil and accueil get my vote
I once had a wonderful french and linguists prof at U C Berkeley. He told us the reason english speakers have difficulty is that french is spoken with the tongue in the back of the mouth and palette and we put ours behind our teeth and lips. It also requires us to exercise muscles in our throat, cheeks, jaws, and lips with three times more stretch and vigor than english. He called our speech lazy. Using this really helps me master the difficult sounds. Hope it helps you too.
I agree with a number of the commenters that écureuil is very difficult. Also, getting the emphasis on the correct syllable for grenouille and citrouille can be a challenge. When I lived in France we English speakers would measure the improvement in our ability to speak French by challenging one another to say: j’étends la main afin d’éteindre la lumière.
I vote for Accueil as a tough word and really oeuf is bad also…used in a sentence for example.
and good idea for a post.thanks
l’oeil. I always say “un de mes yeux” just to avoid it.
I can agree with Kathryn: imagine your tongue has 3 sections: front middle and back. The american English “R” is pronounced by curling the front part of the tongue up and back and speaking the sound. To pronounce the French “R” raise the back third of your tongue towards the top rear of your palate/mouth, keeping the front part low in the jaw behind the bottom teeth, and “push” the air over the tongue while adding the sound. You can often tell when French and English is being spoken even when you can’t hear the speaker, by observing the workings of the mouth during speech.
Usually the R’s and the U’s are the giveaways. While hiking in the Swiss Alps last fall I greeted an on-coming hiker with the usual “hello” (in Swiss dialect). After she passed us I told my husband that she was certainly an American, because even though she only said one word, the R gave her away immediately.
I have trouble with De Rien —- you’re welcome. I’d rather say: Je Vous En Pries. sp? Can’t do Rien. Happy weekend!
without a doubt, for me it is …..yaourt
Grenouille, ecureuil, feuille, Montorgueil, and any other words with that sound are very hard for me, but the hardest of all is to get that lovely lilting quality that makes French so expressive.
Truffe?
That’s the day’s vocabulary haul?
The word I hear mispronounced so often is Monsieur.
“chirurgerie” It’s the worst for me.
I briefly lived in a village in Normandy called Athis de l’Orne, as the Orne river flowed through it. Thirty years later and I still can’t say “Orne.” Going from the R straight to the N is impossible for me.
I lived in Montreal, Quebec for a time. If you consider Quebecois real French then I did my hardware shopping at the quincaillerie which I could never pronounce. Can you? And does it have a French/English translation?
Trying to pronounce ecureuil is bad enough for me, but it makes my husband positively squirrely!
Quincaillerie for sure. Thank goodness the folks at the hardware store near our chalet in Quebec speak some English. We enjoyed Cassis last February. Would love to spend more time there.
fouille
It is interesting now just a small handful of words are topping the list. Rue has always been my Achilles heel. One of the. most common words too. I think it’s because it combines the r and u sound both of which are hard sounds to master in of themselves.
I don’t have a large vocabulary to pull from, but so far “Vielle” has me tongue tied, or lip-pursed, or something! Thank you. Cathia
I would add: “chirurgien” as being a challenge
Roi (king) is at the top of my list also.
My worst word of all time…au revoir…can never seem to make it work…and then I really mess up by changing it so I don’t have to say it and end up with Bonjour instead! Oh dear…and then we all laugh and all is good!! I still love French.
for me it’s cueillir and accueil!
Nous étudiions … vous étudiiez: l’imparfait est très difficile.
Deux. Should not be hard, but I swear that everyone gives us “that look” when we simply want two of something! I guess is the subtlety of duh, dew, da, etc….is the problem.
cou – sounds like cul when I pronounce it.
The same goes for quand and con…..
Carol
Please teach us how to pronounce the difference between au-dessus & au-dessous. Thank you
I am never quite sure how to order Pouilly fuisse wine!
Merci, Nancy
Any words with r or u. I mispronounced menu for years. Also, words with ille or eille or aille at the end are a nightmare for me!
I can’t believe no one said “roi” (unless someone did say it and I missed it.) I feel like I can pronounce most of the words on that top ten list and many of the words listed above, but I could not say the word for “King” if my life depended on it.
Words like “serrurerie”, and those ending in “oeille, euille, eille.etc.”
Going in another direction here but it took me a while to say l’Antarctique well!
Also dessus/dessous
I got this by repeating over and over dessus/dessous in an exaggerated way and then au-dessus/en-dessous over and over with my hand above then below something.
Note if you can’t say u yet you are a bit doomed until you learn that!!
I’ve always found “roi” difficult.
Ah, I see Joanne just a few entries above also mentions it!
Ok how to say u!
A couple of readers explained this here’s my try:
Put your lips in a oooooo sound like booooooo.
Then here’s the tricky part but you can do it!
Keep your lips in the oooooooo shape and at the same time inside your mouth say
Eeeeeeee.
Practice! That’s the u !
My worst trouble in France was requesting “beurre” in restaurants, and I love butter so much.
Yaourt is it for me.
It will be really fun to hear ten of these done right!
As you know, Kristin .. after loving France and visiting as much or more than anyone I know, my French linguistic skills are sorely lacking .. THEREFORE, I speak “Heart” .. it has served me well for many years – no pronunciation necessary. Aloha!
Hareng (herring in English) Not only can I not say it, I can’t even remember how you’re supposed to say it!
Also ‘treize’. 13 is certainly an unlucky number for me as well especially when I have to make lunch reservations. I can hear them valiantly trying not to laugh!
écureuil – it’s a tricky one, for sure … but I take pleasure in hearing the French try to pronounce the English word! It makes me not feel so bad. 🙂
écureuil…for me, and as I look through the comments here, it is difficult for many others as well. My French friends however find squirrel very difficult also!
le nôtre always drove me around the bend.
Miss sir – otherwise known as Monsieur!
In my high school, “foreign” languages were taught using the Audio-Lingual Method, in which the students were to learn much like a child learns its first language. In my ALM French studies, we heard and spoke nothing but French (in class and in the language lab) from the first day (and we did not see any written French until sometime during the second year). This was a very effective approach, and some 50 years later, it continues to provide a firm foundation for my use and continued learning of French.
Here is how we were taught to say the “u” in “tu:” say “eeeeee” broadly, then say “oooooh” broadly, then, with the mouth still in that “oooooh” position, try to say “eeeeee.” What emerges is the correct French “u” as in “tu.”
There is an old fashioned children’s rhyme which is: “Tur-lu-tu-tu-chapeau pointu” Say it over and over being careful to master the ‘u’ and distinguish it from ‘ou’. Repeat ‘u’ ‘ou’ over and over so that you hear the difference. You will never mispronounce the French ‘u’.
Prendre. I never know which “R” to pronounce particulary in different tenses.
Fauteuil is by far the worst!
Hmmm … it’s a toss-up between “accueil” and “libellule”. Fortunately, they are not everyday words that I need to rely on for communicating with my Breton wife.
Chartres