If you want to create one of the most romantic evenings of your life, get out the candles for dinner, set the lights down low and learn how to say i love you in French. You’ll find that it’s worth the effort and makes the person you say it to feel special.
French is the language of love so it only seems right that it’s the best one to convey your words of love. However, it also is a difficult language to master if you simply see it written and don’t hear it. The letters are not pronounced as they are in English.
In English, we have voiced letters and unvoiced letters. For instance, if you say a “p” sound, “puh”, and put your hands on your neck next to your vocal chords, you don’t feel any movement. It is an unvoiced letter. If you say the letter “b,” its voiced partner, you can feel the vibration in your throat. The same is true for French letters such as the letter “r” in French. An unvoiced “r” makes a drum roll type of noise than the spoken r we’re used to saying.
When written in French, the words I love you are “Je t’aime.” The letter j in French is not pronounced the same way it is in English. Instead of the familiar sound you hear in the work Jack or jump, you hear a zh sound. This is similar to the sound that g makes in the word “mirage”. An interesting fact is that in the French language, the letter “g” also makes the zh sound if it has an “e, i or y” after it.
The “e” in the first part of the phrase has the sound of the oo in hood. The second part “t’aime” is the easiest. Forget what the word looks like it should sound like. You pronounce it “tem”. When you put the phrase together, you have zhoo tem as the phonetic pronunciation.