I’m fluent in german and my german teacher in high school (who was infact a native speaker) told me I sounded exactly like a native speaker.
But I can’t achieve the same thing with french. Funny enough I sound like a german speaking french. I try to make my speech sound gentle and smooth, but i cant get that charateristic glottal sound out of my voice. How do you do this?
#1 by TexHabsfan on October 22nd, 2011
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practise with native speakers whenever possible.
ask for extra vocabulary words and assignments.
#2 by mirellaki on October 22nd, 2011
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I am learning Mandarin right now, and was fortunate enough to have in my class an other student who was a speech language pathologist (orthophoniste in French).
She gave us some exercises to practice in order to get a chinese accent, to the utter surprise of the Chinese teacher. These exercises, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), proved to be incredibly useful! Even the teacher who was dubious at first, recognized that it was the first time that 1st year students were almost perfect in their pronunciation (not intonation, we still have to master that!).
So you might want to pay for a couple lessons with someone like that to improve your pronunciation.
Good luck.
#3 by RizThon on October 22nd, 2011
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French and German are quite similar, so if you have (almost) no accent when speaking German, you should be able to do the same in French.
The first thing of course is to listen carefully to each word and try to pronounce it correctly. But once you pronounce each word correctly, you still have to pronounce the whole sentence as a French would do, not as a German would do.
In German, you speak each word separately, without ever linking them. In French on the other hand, you quite often link words, eg “ils ont” will be pronounced “ils zont”. Actually French people usually don’t find German to be a nice language, as opposed to Spanish, because they find it too rough.
As for the glottal sound out of your voice, well, I don’t know…
#4 by Susie T on October 22nd, 2011
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It’s almost impossible for an English native speaker to get rid of glottal stops. Remember that:
t without glottal is d
p without glottal is b
k without glottal is g
Try to “elide” your glottals into nonglottals, making t’s sound more like d’s etc. It’s hard but doable. I think you can only really achieve it if you are around native speakers a lot. I try, but they seem to think I am Canadian (at least they don’t think I’m an American ignoramus).
The other problem is usually the French “r”, It’s higher in the throat than a German r. Just at the back of the mouth. Roll your uvula gently. My sister used to swallow her French r’s and she sounded like she was choking. Again, I think it’s easier if you are around native speakers a lot. http://www.about.com has free French lessons complete with audio, a new one every day. You can listen for free and see if that helps.
Good luck!
#5 by ? ? ? on October 22nd, 2011
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You have to practise it!…Just because you can talk German without an accent doesn’t make you can also do the same in French..you know.
But that’s cool that you can naturally do this…
#6 by Rachel Roth on October 22nd, 2011
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I don’t know…I suppose certain accents come more easily to certain people than to others. However, learning through singing can be useful for both vocabulary and accents.
Sing2learn.com — if you can sing, you can learn!