How to Learn French - It's all Greek to me...

You may have noticed the pronunciation table was becoming a little bit hors de contrôle* recently. I had, too, so I spent most of my writing time designing a new, coherent layout with all 37 of the French sounds included. I hope to be able to show it to you in the coming months.

I was in two minds as to whether to include all of the consonnes*, as many of them are so similar to English, but in the interests of completeness (or the disease of le perfectionnisme*), I decided to put them all in.

It was in doing this that I learned something brand new (for me) and thought I’d share it with you, too. This is not a major component of French pronunciation (au contraire*) but it is really interesting.

In French, the combination of ch is almost always pronounced as a ‘sh’ sound. One very famous example springs immediately to mind, but there are others.

champagne
chambre
chercher
marché
chocolat

However, there’s un petit groupe* of words where a ‘k’ sound is pronounced instead. Most often, they are words of Greek origin, so if your word belongs to the realm of medicine, science, music, religion or ancient history, fais attention* !

Here are a few of the more common ones to get you started.

chœur (choir)
chorale (chorale group)
chronologie
chrome
chaos
orchestre
écho
psychologie
Christ
choléra
technique
charisme


C’est intéressant, non* ?

*out of control | *consonants | *perfectionism | *on the contrary | *a little group | *be careful | *It’s interesting, isn’t it?