Improving pronunciation isn't just about pronouncing better, it's also about understanding better!
Where does the accent come from?
Speaking your mother tongue is easy. But the later you learn a language, the harder it is to perceive and reproduce new sounds and intonations. Apart from a few rare exceptions, we always keep a little (or big 😁 ) accent.
Why? Because instead of hearing foreign sounds as they really are, we hear them through the filter of our mother tongue. And we try to reproduce them like that. So if we speak with a foreign accent, it's because we also hear with that accent!
That's why the French tend to say zi end instead of the end. They replace the sound [ð] (the th) by the closest sound in French, [z].
Similarly, English speakers struggle to correctly articulate the French 'r' in "un rendez-vous," which they produce as an English 'r'. Japanese speakers, for their part, have great difficulty distinguishing between "il lit" (he reads) and "il rit" (he laughs), as the 'r' and 'l' sounds are pronounced the same way in their native language.
As for English speakers, they suffer with the French 'r' in "rendez-vous", which they pronounce the English way.
This difficulty in accurately perceiving foreign sounds can slow down or hinder comprehension. And when we try to reproduce sounds that we perceive poorly, others in turn have difficulty understanding us.
However, having an accent has never prevented anyone from communicating. On the other hand, it does affect the attention paid to our words, as well as the image others form of us.
Why is good pronunciation important?
Even if we are patient, we all have a threshold of tolerance for foreign accents. Indeed, when sounds and intonations are too different from our language, our brain has to make an effort to compensate. Over time, this can cause us to lose interest in the conversation.
It's like listening to a poorly tuned radio. Even if you're patient and enjoy the music, when the sound crackles and you can't hear the lyrics, your brain has to make an extra effort to understand. After a while, you get tired and want to change the station or turn off the radio.
At work, having an accent can prevent you from getting certain positions. Unconsciously, people may think it means you're less competent or less reliable. It's not fair, but that's how it is: having a "standard" accent helps in professional success. having a "standard" accent helps you succeed professionally.
But good pronunciation also means the right intonations. We use them to express our emotions, to emphasize what's important, and even to convey messages without using words...
So pronouncing well is super important. It helps us communicate better, and it helps others listen to us longer and more attentively.
Our phonetic correction sessions
Our goal is to help you achieve a pronunciation that is at least "pleasant," at best "perfect," according to the norms of the French-speaking Lemanic region. Although our sessions also allow for correcting bad habits, we recommend acquiring good pronunciation from the very beginning of the learning process. It's a valuable asset to better benefit from all future conversations.
It's entirely possible. Unlike vocabulary, which you can learn endlessly, there are only about thirty different sounds in French.
The teacher uses his or her knowledge of French sounds to work on selected phrases or phrases taken from conversation. He will distort sounds, accentuate phonetic contrasts and play with intonation and sentence rhythm. All this to make you hear correctly the frequencies you don't hear well at first. He can also explain how to position the mouth, tongue, etc., to produce the desired sound.
For your part, you simply try to repeat what the teacher says. It's a back-and-forth between your attempts and the different versions of the sentence the teacher gives, until he or she thinks it's right... or not, because not everything works the first time!
Our phonetic correction sessions are conducted online in individual sessions or in small groups of a maximum of 4 people and last approximately 20 minutes.
