Stressed Out

It occurred to me today, while watching 'Inspecteur Barnaby' (The Midsomer Murders) in dubbed French, that it's not just vocabulary and pronunciation of words that deter me from understanding all the dialogue in these programs.  A whole lot of it has to do with stress--and I don't mean the kind you have to take a tranquilizer for.  Every now and then I can isolate a word or phrase that I didn't grasp at first because, even though often the words are cognates of English, such as the 'tion' words, the stress on a syllable was not what I'd expect.

As you know, French syllables are for the most part stressed evenly, with a slight emphasis on the last syllable, at least most of the time.  This peculiarity often involves a word that, if I were to see in writing, I'd recognize immediately, but because of the rhythm the stress creates, the word or phrase seems 'foreign.'

Now, what to do about this problem?  It seems that, as with so many things in learning a new language, the only remedy is to listen, listen, and the listen again.  I suppose that finally recognizing and acknowledging this issue is a major breakthrough.  As seems to be so often the case, French instructors often fail to point out this difference in spoken French and instead focus more on reproducing French vowel sounds and other phonetic matters.  Understanding how French is accented is crucial in learning to comprehend spoken French, because the rhythm that the stress creates in a sentence affects the way individual words are heard by English speakers.  Often the stress at the end of one word will merge with the beginning of the next word, so that both words sound completely different than they are written. 

So, I've got a lot of tuning up to do on my ears.  Back to the drawing board; or rather, back to the Inspecteur.

A la prochaine...