Having about 130 million speakers worldwide, French ranks among the most popular languages in the world. This romantic language has attracted many learners who have various reasons for desiring to speak the language. For the first time ever, people can now forget all the systems and policies they come across in their initial few lessons of the language. It is vital for all French lesson-beginners to set a number of rules that will govern them and in turn aid in their advancement stages. The integral constituent in French is the ability to pronounce words clearly and correctly. The first lessons in French play a very important role in the central stages of the learning lessons. As a rule, one must make a mistake to learn therefore, forget all the imaginary embarrassments that come about because of mispronunciation.
The key aspect in French language as mentioned above is pronunciation and the uniqueness of the French accent is attributed to the way Frenchmen round their mouths while pronouncing words. In fact, there is a classic way in how French natives pronounce ‘r’. Compared to Englishmen, French nationalities use additional nasality since they pronounce words via their noses. Therefore, to get best results when speaking in French, learners ought to imagine they are actually speaking the language. This means that as they speak, potential French speakers should emulate French accents to make pronunciation flow easily.
As soon as one learns how to say hello in French, the person will be successful in learning the rest of the language. Try putting nasal sounds on all the ‘n’ consonants and rolls on all ‘r’ letters as well. There are different ways through which a person can say hello in French and this is usually determined by the situation; whether informal or formal, how one is greeted by another person and the relation of the people saying hello to each other.
The general way of saying hello in French is ‘Bonjour’ and the pronunciation is ‘bohn zhoor.’ The greeting generally means good day and is mostly used in the morning.
• When answering the telephone, the greeting takes another form and becomes ‘Allo’ usually pronounced as ‘ah lo’.
• If one wants to attract the attention of another person they will use ‘Hé’ which pronounced as ‘ay’
• When saying hi to one’s friends informally one can use ‘salut!’ whose pronunciation is ‘sah loo’.
• Saying hello formally in the afternoon takes another completely different form and one should say ‘Bon aprés midi’ which is pronounced as ‘buhn ah pray mee dee’
• For formal greetings in the evening one should use ‘Bon soir’ and the pronunciation for this one is ‘buhn swahr’.
Apart from hello one can use other phrases when greeting someone in French as well Such phrases include ‘Ça fait plaisir de te revoir’ which means it was nice to have seen one again and its French pronunciation is ‘sah fay play seehr duh tuh reh vwahr’. Another helpful phrase is ‘Enchante’ which means it was a pleasure to meet someone and it is pronounced as ‘ohn chohn tay’. When learning, French it is important to know that it is not only words that can help one make the first impression but the accompanying customs as well.
