Sa-weeet French language site!

Hi all. Please forgive this all-English post but I am a bit too excited about a web site that I've found to explain it in French. You HAVE to check out http://ielanguages.com/, especially the French phonetics tutorial! (http://ielanguages.com/frenchphonetics.html) The author also does a really good job of comparing French to Spanish and Italian.

I had been looking words up in my dictionary and copying down the phonetic spellings for a few weeks now but was still having issues with a lot of the vowel sounds because phonetic spellings of vowels are, well, pretty tricky in any language. Since finding this site though I think I might have a chance at getting those pronunciations right! The tutorial goes over every single French vowel sound side-by-side with its phonetic spelling, along with a native French speaker saying the sounds. Incroyable! Check it out.

And if it helps you to know how those vowel sounds are made in your mouth (backness, roundedness, nasalization, etc.), I've found that the Wikipedia page on vowels is pretty useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel. Click on the IPA vowel chart, which contains links to a recording of every sound. It's a bit annoying that you have to download first if you're on a Mac to hear anything but it might be worth it to possibly learn these sounds correctly. Some day!