6 Helpful French Pronunciation Apps
French is a hard language to pronounce.
No use fretting over it. It’s better to focus on being productive.
I’ve listed six of my favorite French pronunciation apps in this article. So, you can read about them, test ’em out, pick your favorites and get to work!
Contents
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
Apps That Build Impeccable French Pronunciation Skills
If you’re new to French, make sure you check out this post on French pronunciation before you get started.
Once you have a good understanding of French pronunciation, you can start exploring this list of our favorite apps for improving your speaking skills (in addition to all these other French language apps we’ve told you about before).
The more work you put into working with these apps, the more you’ll get out of them. Really take advantage of them every day and you’ll notice the difference in your pronunciation skills before you know it!
We’ve also compiled a bunch of other online tools to help perfect your French pronunciation you should check out.
1. Duolingo
Duolingo incorporates French pronunciation into every part of the app.
Not only does the app dictate French text to you, but it also makes you repeat French phrases into your microphone. This reinforces the pronunciation skills you’ve started to pick up by making you practice out loud. And the app rewards you and incentivizes you (with the coveted prizes of pride, bragging points and their digital currency, Lingots) to keep learning and practicing every day.
The less-than-great part of the app is that the French-speaking voices are somewhat robotic, so you’ll have to get used to that if you want to get the most out of the app. It also mispronounces words on occasion, but I’ve only run into this issue a handful of times.
Generally, the app is a really solid resource for learning vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. It’s also really easy to make into a habit. For example, if you devote 15 minutes every morning during your commute or 15 minutes every evening before bed to completing one or two lessons on Duolingo, you’ll have finished the app in no time.
Once you’ve gotten that far, you’ll have a pretty solid understanding of the basics of the language upon which to build.
2. FluentU
Available: iPhone/iPad | Android | Browser
On FluentU, you can hear native pronunciation from many different sources. The program has put together a collection of authentic French video content that features native French people speaking.
Videos like movie trailers, show clips, news segments, funny commercials and informative talks are paired with learning features to make them accessible to learners of different skills. Each video has interactive subtitles with on-demand translations, multimedia flashcards and transcripts, key word lists, personalized quizzes and more.
For a learner who wants to practice pronunciation, this translates to hundreds of hours of authentic speech to listen to and mimic. Accurate subtitles and native pronunciation mean that you can easily shadow any content you enjoy or want to learn.
You can also repeat after the audio pronunciations that accompany every flashcard. And since the flashcards also include clips from other videos where the word appears, you’ll be able to hear and repeat after many different accents.
Finally, FluentU’s review exercises include questions that let you speak your answer for further pronunciation practice.
3. (How to) Pronounce
Available: iPhone/iPad
With (How to) Pronounce, you can learn pronunciation in languages from Spanish to Polish to, of course, French. The cool thing about this app is that it will read any text you input out loud, either at a normal speaking pace or at a slightly slower speed.
All you have to do is select “French” as your language and type in the French text you need to know how to pronounce.
The key thing to know is that this app is excellent for learning the pronunciation of single words, but it’s not so great with streams of text.
For example, if your type in the word fatigué (tired), the app will read the text back to you perfectly. However, if you were to type in a sentence such as Ma mère est fatiguée parce qu’elle a beaucoup travaillé (My mother is very tired because she worked a lot), the app would read the sentence back, but the pronunciation wouldn’t be as clear. When pronouncing sentences, the app strings all the words together in a monotone stream, making it a bit difficult to grasp the pronunciation of each individual word.
Of course, French is often spoken with lots of elided words and no clear breaks between words, so the app is faithful to the language in that regard. However, French speakers will usually also have inflections in their voice and parse their sentences, whereas this app does not.
When learning basic pronunciation skills, hearing a Siri-like voice dictate monotone streams of text isn’t great, but if you need to know the pronunciation of a specific single word, this app is a pretty great resource.
Oh, and you can also choose between French as it’s pronounced in France and French as it’s pronounced in Canada, if you’re interested, because keeping your audience in mind is important, too!
4. Memrise
With Memrise, language learners are tested on all things spoken French, but it’s all part of a fun adventure that makes language learning an exciting and challenging journey. It begins:
“The Uniformist front is infiltrating the Multiverse… Soon, they’ll overthrow the Alliance and establish a rule of uniformity and hate… Welcome to the Alliance, recruit. To commence training, please confirm your credentials.”
As you can see, it’s certainly entertaining!
In this regard, Memrise is similar to Duolingo in that it makes language learning a fun, addictive and gamified experience for its users. It likewise incentivizes users to practice every day with goals and leader scoreboards.
It also offers good quality French pronunciation for every vocabulary word that it introduces to you. And its patented “mems” feature lets you add your own personal memory aid to every word, which can be super helpful with remembering French pronunciation. Memrise recommends you think about how the word sounds, what the sounds remind you of and what it rhymes with. All good habits for French learners who are improving pronunciation.
Unlike Duolingo, however, a lot of the language you’ll learn through this app is fairly casual. For instance, the first few words you’ll learn are salut (hi), which is a casual way of saying bonjour (hello), quoi de neuf ? (what’s new?/what’s up?) and condensed phrases like j’ai pas compris, which is the casual, truncated version of je n’ai pas compris (I don’t understand). This makes it the perfect app for French language learners who only want to learn casual conversation skills, and nothing too fancy.
The app does offer its users some interesting English translation choices, like “bottoms up!” as a translation for “salut !” But hey, this certainly keeps the language-learning process entertaining!
5. Speak & Translate
With this app, you can either type or speak the text that you want to know how to say in English (or any of a multitude of other languages) and the app will translate and dictate the word/phrase in French for you.
In this regard, the app serves a pretty unique niche. The app is great for French learners who like learning the language with the help of a dictionary or vocab book. This app essentially serves the same purpose as a dictionary, but with the added perk of teaching you how the French words are pronounced as well.
However, just like many machine translation services, the app certainly makes its share of mistakes. It’s much better with single words than it is with full sentences. For example, when I dictated “My father is not home” into my microphone, the app repeated it in French as “Mon père n’est pas maison,” a more-than-literal, grammatically-incorrect rendering of the English sentence.
Yes, of course, I could have said “My father is not at home” to clarify any confusion for the app, but regardless, this indicates that the app, like many machine translation services, isn’t quite there yet in terms of full sentence translation.
Nevertheless, the app is pretty good at translating single words, like “father,” “mother,” etc. So, it’s certainly more of a pronunciation dictionary, than a pronunciation phrasebook. And the pronunciation of the words is pretty good.
One cool feature of the app is that you can also save translations that you’ve already searched for, essentially creating your own offline personalized dictionary to use whenever you want.
6. French Today Audiobook Player
Available: iPhone/iPad | Android | Desktop App
This app is part audiobook player and part textbook, and it’s tailored specifically to French language learners. Check it out and download your first free audiobook, the first installment of the series of audiobooks called “À moi Paris,” for free to see what it’s all about.
Each audiobook tells a story with characters and a plot. The app offers you the option of hearing the French text of the story dictated to you at various speeds (normal, slower or modern street French) as you read along with the text. The pronunciation is perfect, not at all robotic, and very clear. And you can also choose to read along with the French text, either with or without the English translations underneath.
Following each chapter, there’s a question and answer section where you can test your comprehension, and a study guide section with vocabulary charts and grammar explanations. (This is where the “textbook” part comes in!)
The app probably isn’t perfect for everybody. But the first installment of the “À moi Paris” series of audiobooks is free, so you might as well check it out and see if it’s the language learning and pronunciation tool you need to take your French skills to the next level!
There you have it, folks.
You’ve got nothing to lose with these free (or at least, affordable) French apps.
Give these a try and see how far you go with your French pronunciation!
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
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