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Basics

French from the start

Learn to read French spelling, hear every letter, and read short guides to how French works.

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67Letters to learn
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38Guides

Vowels and accents

French is written in the same 26 letters as English, plus accents on vowels and a cedilla on ç. An accent on e changes its sound; on other letters accents mostly keep words apart, like ou "or" and où "where". Each sound is shown in IPA, the phonetic alphabet of dictionaries, with a word that shows it.

Read the guide: Vowels and accents
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Vowels

6 letters

French vowels are short and steady, without the glide English adds at the end: café, not "cafay-ee". Written together, vowels often make other sounds; see Vowel combinations.

Accents

12 letters

é, è and ê give e its sounds. Elsewhere an accent rarely changes the sound: it marks a lost letter (forêt, forest) or tells words apart (à "to" and a "has"). Two dots split a vowel from the one before: Noël.