French is hard! There are too many silent letters!
TLDR: Silent letters are a core, rule-based feature of the French language's phonology. If you were to take a typical paragraph and count the number of letters that are not pronounced in their spoken form, the French version would almost certainly have a higher percentage of silent letters.
French: Systematic, but pervasive. You learn the rules for word endings and liaisons.
English: Less pervasive, but highly irregular and unpredictable. You often have to memorize the pronunciation of each word.
This is what I love about teaching French pronunciation: there are rules and a few exceptions, but you can learn the rules and be pretty certain about how to pronounce the words. Relative to English, French pronunciation is easy, I promise you!
Do you need an example? Imagine being a learner of English as a second language and you see these words: enough, bough, thorough, cough, through. You will struggle, thinking that the same spelling means they all have the same pronunciation. Alas, not true! I know that it’s cruel that there are so many silent letters in French, like in the word “eaux” (waters, in English) that is just pronounced like “oh”. Once you learn this, you know exactly how to pronounce this word and others like it.
French: The King of Silent Letters
In French, silent letters are not the exception; they are a fundamental part of the writing system. The most famous rule is that final consonants are often silent. The letters -s, -t, -d, -x, -z, and -p are almost always silent at the end of a word, as in the examples below:
petit (small) - the 't' is silent
chaud (hot) - the 'd' is silent
trois (three) - the 's' is silent
beaucoup (a lot) - the 'p' is silent
There is one major exception: The final consonant is often pronounced when the next word begins with a vowel (a process called liaison). For example, the 's' in les amis (the friends) is pronounced as a 'z' sound to link the words. There are rules for this that can be learned, and I teach these rules in my classes.
The Silent 'e': The letter 'e' at the end of a word is almost always silent (e.g., ville, table). It can also be silent in the middle of a word, affecting the pronunciation of surrounding consonants.
The Silent 'h': French has two types of 'h', and both are silent. The difference is that one prevents liaison and elision (the h aspiré), while the other does not (the h muet).
h muet: l'homme (the man)
h aspiré: le hockey (hockey) - no liaison is made.
Other Common Silent Letters:
The 'p' in psychologie (psychology)
The 'ent' at the end of third-person plural verbs: ils parlent (they speak) - the '-ent' is silent.
In essence, a large portion of the letters in a standard French sentence are not pronounced, making the written form much longer than the spoken form.
All is not lost!
My classes teach you these rules (and any exceptions) so that you can confidently know how to pronounce French words. We will learn the rules, learn HOW to pronounce them by studying the position of the mouth organs, and by associating sounds with the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). After a few classes, your confidence in your pronunciation will skyrocket, and you will also be able to understand spoken French better (a weird side effect of learning correct French pronunciation).
