Yearlyglot

Alphabets are scary things — when you understand an alphabet, you are sufficiently equipped to intuit many things about the text written in it, even if you don’t actually know a word of that language. However, when you don’t understand the alphabet, you find yourself saying, “It’s all Greek to me!”

When I first got started this with Italian, I started by looking for the alphabet and its sounds, and I used YouTube to hear them correctly pronounced by a native Italian speaker. But several of my readers are learning French, and I never really got things started for them. So today I’d like to just explore the sounds of French.

The internet is full of potential for use in endless unexpected ways. Today, we’re going to talk about two uses which are really not terribly amazing, but which are incredibly useful to the language learner.

Remember that knowing what you’re saying doesn’t matter; you’ve only just begun. The goal is to be fluent in one year, not in one day. Though it may not sound like much, you’ve got time. A whole year. What’s important is that you’re already speaking in a new language!

Now that we’ve got our alphabets learned, let’s take a deeper look at the sounds of letters and letter combinations, and learn a little bit about spelling.