Faire un Discours (Making a speech in French)

Kyougu

I have a close friend who's a french teacher and just generally loves the french language. One of our jokes is me constant annoying her with my disastrous pronounciation of said language.

Now her birthday is coming up in December and I thought it would be neat to give her a short speech about how much she means to me and how much I appreciate her friendship in French, WITH correct pronuanciation.

Any tips on how I could manage this? The memorization of the actual speech doesn't worry me, but I'm at a lost on how to get it actually sounding right.

CelestialBadger

I think that it would be impossible. You need to be steeped in a language to pronounce it correctly.

see317

Do you have any other friends that speak french? Maybe ask one of them to help you write the speech, or serve as a stand in audience for you to rehearse to so they can correct your pronunciation.
Failing that, I'd be willing to bet that someone on these forums speaks french fluently, maybe if someone volunteers themselves, you could do the whole rehearsing thing over skype or something.

Usagi

Maybe just stick to something simple, like "Bon anniversaire, mon amie!"

Comahawk

CelestialBadger wrote: »

I think that it would be impossible. You need to be steeped in a language to pronounce it correctly.

This.

Even after a summer immersed in a French culture and being payed to learn French, my accent is still terrible. You would be trying to overcome decades of habit in a short time, it is unlikely to happen.

PedroAsani

The single biggest problem that English speakers have is they feel silly attempting the accent. But if you don't use the right accent for a language, you sound like this policeman. The single best piece of advice is to lean in to the accent.

ceres

And then post it on YouTube for us.

Rend

PedroAsani is 100% correct. Keep this in mind. I feel like this is one of the biggest obstacles when people have bad form in just about anything: You will probably feel silly, and then sound correct.

I saw this in French class, Italian class, and even Fencing class. People know the correct form, but they don't use it because they feel silly. Maybe they feel like they're being stereotypical, or like there's more to it, but a lot of the time it's just about abandoning whatever you feel like it should feel or sound like, and just embracing the form for what it is.