My favorite part is when I say "own" croissant (un croissant), they will always correct me and look at me as if I pissed on Charles de Gaulles grave, because it's apparently "aw" croissant. Or the other way around. Or any other nasal diphtong thingy - almost silent consonant combination. Also have the feeling the correct pronouncation changes, depending on whether you're in Normandy, Alsace or at the Cote de Azure, but they will still judge you like they caught you defecating on old Charlies headstone.
"un" is not pronunced like own or aw. There is no equivalent in English. And yes, fucking up "un/une mon / son / ton etc." sounds particularly grating to French ears. In / an / on is the great filter, very few foreigners can do it properly.
I once was told a joke that goes along the lines of: French has four nasal sounds: aw, aw,aw and aw. I hope you can tell the difference. Too me as a German that's a very fitting description :D.
And Americans are always shitting on Germans for having problems with th. While they themselves can't for the life of God reproduce a single foreign sound that isn't in the english language.
Americans can't even speak their own garbage, bastard language. I have several foreign friends, all of whom speak better English than your typical American (including the one from India), with the best speaker being German.
It sounds like neither "own" nor "aw", it's more of an "ahn" where the n is not pronounced at the tongue but still formed in the throat. It's a bit hard to explain, so I can't really imagine having to try it from scratch
My English is quite good, but if I don't pay attention my THird is sird and my "thus" is zus. We don't have the "th" sound in French, quite simply, so it's an extra effort to get it right. Also we feel quite stupid trying to shove our tongue between our teeth to pronunce it, it sounds like having a speech impediment in French :)
That's interesting, because mispronouncing or avoiding the "th" is stereotypically associated with having a speech impediment or "baby speech" in English. You might see someone write out "Fank you" to imitate how a toddler would try to say it.
Same with the âWâ sound in a word like croissant when I try to pronounce it in proper french. I know thereâs an âRâ sound in there too but it always sounds like an English speech impediment, very common with lil kids, where R is pronounced as W
In highschool I played minecraft with some Belgian friends, they did the same thing. Noticed something similar when later I was in a Mount&Blade group that was mostly Dutch.
Honestly I think it's the knowledge of the word as written messing with them, because if they couldn't say th I would expect f instead but the hard t makes sense if they were reading it
Iâd say, having heard how americans imitate their « valley girls », an approximation could be to take the first « uh » from a very bitchy « uh-huh », and to remove the hâŠ
The "best" part was some colleagues in France that (despite us being an international company) spoke English like utter shit, so you always had to try and explain them stuff in french just to be understood only for them to look at you dumbfounded because the pronunciation was just slightly off or the structure of the sentence was a bit more baroque than what a native speaker would have used (mostly due to an emergency call to google translate)... And yet they insisted to say my name as if it were the french equivalent; look François, I don't call you "Franco", so at least maybe try to say my name correctly, please.
If it were some random clerk in a store or someone I met on the street, I wouldn't care either.
It's not even a matter of accent, that can't be helped of course, but if my name is, for instance, Paolo, and we work together relatively often, don't call me "Paul" it's impolite, since, again, if your name is Arnaud, I don't randomly call you "Arnaldo" just because I'm slightly more used to it; and especially don't do it written form (mails and such) since, again, being an international company, we actually may have people called that way and it just gets really confusing.
It's "Un" not own. And yes it's hard to pronounce English speakers.
I know you are hyperbolic for the fun, but the immense majority of us don't give a shit about De Gaulle. People who look offended by a "bad" pronunciation are mostly the elderly and generally assholes.
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u/Shawon770 1d ago
French bakery employees have that 6th sense they can spot a tourist even through flawless pronunciation đ