French is a beautiful language when spoken correctly as it has a musical flowing quality to it. Learning the language though can be quite difficult for English speakers with no French cultural background or experience in learning other languages as the pronunciations, grammar and many subtle concepts are quite different to English so when learning to speak French you need to start right at the beginning and get the groundwork right before going on to more advanced things.

How to speak French – The Basics

One of the first things you must understand when learning to speak French is that the French divide everything into genders meaning that every noun has a male and female association. Knowing when a noun is masculine or feminine is a frustrating concept for many but it must be mastered to understand how to speak French properly. When educating yourself in French you must be aware that the ending of nouns and often the prefixes indicate which gender they belong to so for example:

un aide is a MALE assistant and une aide is a FEMALE assistant le mode is a method or a mood and la mode is a fashion le solde is a sale or a balance of accounts and la solde is to pay

As you can see this can be confusing where the same word with a slight change means something different and if you do not pronounce it correctly you will change the meaning of a conversation dramatically. How to speak French, the basics at least, is often more a battle in how to change the way you think when speaking more than memorize these words however so do not get stuck on trying to remember everything as the basics are the rules that define the grammar.

Tags: basics, France, speak