In the end there are no hiding places, pronunciation will hunt you down and find you out.
Although I’m loving my own application and it has helped a huge amount for me in terms of fluency and pronunciation, I still need all the help I can get. For example, those ‘r’s….Let’s get them over and done with, nothing is more depressing than how completely hopeless it is to try to make that uniquely French sound.
Français interactif, the course from which I took the content of my app, has phonetic sections to each part of its course. I’ve been looking at its advice and sound files for ‘r’ today.
The French /R/ sound bears no resemblance to the American or English sound typically associated with the letter r. The French /R/ is a fricative produced when air “rubs” against the back of the throat. The result is a sound similar to a light clearing of the throat. To produce a French /R/, place the tip of the tongue behind the lower teeth and actively produce friction in the back of the tongue.
So, I can do this, stick my tongue behind my lower teeth and make horrible gargling noises. But how can you actually say a word like that? You can’t. And if you let your tongue out, you aren’t going to be able to make the ‘r’.
Anyway. The sound files are good, I’ve been listening and repeating, listening and repeating. But I haven’t managed to do anything like the right ‘r’ noise. And in fact, I suspect I’ve been doing something which might be worse than nothing, making a different sort of weird ‘r’ noise by moving the wrong part of my tongue.
I needed cheering up after this, so I moved onto a site I haven’t noticed before called Simple-French which has a detailed very interesting discussion of the ‘r’ sound which you can find here. Let’s get the bad news out of the way. As if it weren’t quite enough to be told it’s a fricative, Simple-French takes you that one step further into the nightmare. It’s not any old fricative in fact, that noise you have to make, it’s an uvular fricative. This site has an excellent short video with the repetitions recommended for practising the various r+vowel combinations which backs up a descriptive analysis of should be happening in your throat to get that ‘r’ sound going.
French Alone 