How good is your French accent?

Lot of stereotypes in the comments. I&#x27;m little disappointed to read that on HN.<p>Some commenters tell they had bad experiences in France. In my opinion, it&#x27;s a case of confirmation bias and lack of understanding of cultural differences. For many reasons, you can&#x27;t expect the same types of interactions with a waiter in Paris and one in NYC or Tokyo. I think people traveling to foreign countries should be open-minded and understand that things may work a little differently than in their home country.<p>The French aren&#x27;t arrogant assholes overprotective of their language! that&#x27;s just plain stereotype. Yes, they don&#x27;t speak English as well as Swedes for instance, but not worse than let say Italians. Besides, there are tons of English words making their way in the French language.<p>Also, French people are often shy of speaking English. Sadly, we tend to make fun of each other, and those that haven&#x27;t had the opportunity to practice outside school are often embarrassed to speak English.

Funny Story: I was traveling from Portugal back to the U.S. through Charles de Gaulle Airport and my Dad gave me 4 Euros. I went to this little bakery and the man behind the counter asked me what I wanted in French. I mustered up as much <i>throat</i> as I possibly could and said <i>croissant</i> which was apparently good enough for him to go off on this long answer to what I ordered. I looked at him blankly and said &quot;Sorry man, that&#x27;s the only word I know.&quot; He was not amused.

I&#x27;m french so I had to try it out! Although I got 90-100% on all words, I was able to get 50+% on most words doing what I think is a strong (but totally understandable) american accent in french. That was fun!

It&#x27;s too easy. I got 100% on &quot;Bonjour,&quot; but I definitely do not sound native to French people. I know this because last year I took a hike in a french gorge and greeted people with &quot;Bonjour&quot; but they often answered me back in English.<p>But I&#x27;ll take the flattery. :)

Misleading app. If you say &quot;bon appétit&quot; in a good French accent, it fails, then if you say it in a very bad accent but imitating the distinct pitch and rhythm of the guy in the recording, it scores 100%.

Interesting, it looks like this is an app geared at accent reduction, which could be promising. I&#x27;ll try it out.<p>Duolingo French elicits speech, but I fear that it is set so permissive as to hardly be helpful (I haven&#x27;t dared to test feeding it nonsense or clearly incorrect pronunciations yet). There&#x27;s a Czech-learning app I use that uses speech recognition to test the user&#x27;s pronunciation, but the implementation is bad: it is fairly strict, and the speech recognition simply tries to interpret the speech (rather than gauging correctness), so it frequently misinterprets the user&#x27;s utterance as another statement entirely. Which is frustrating and unhelpful.

I think in general the French outside of Paris are more polite, especially in tourist areas. I&#x27;ve had Europeans complain to me about rude New Yorkers. I think at least part of it is the big city.<p>I&#x27;ve found the friendliest people in France are in the South. Along the French Riviera the economy is highly dependent upon tourists and they want the repeat business.<p>Many years ago I visited a restaurant near the train station in Nice. The proprietor seated me at a table with someone else. I was confused until I realized he seated me with a regular who spoke English. I visited a week later and he did the same thing but with another regular.<p>A dozen years later I relayed the story to my parents who were going to visit the area. My mother who did speak fluent French had a long conversation with the proprietor. After paying their bill he gave them a wine pitcher with the restaurants name and said give this to your son. Together we&#x27;ve probably sent two dozen friends to that restaurant.

Android app would be much appreciated!

Heh, kinda cool! Definitely in its beginning stages, but I had to try it out as I&#x27;m probably a target market; studied French for ~10 years (middle school, high school, some university), and have spent a total of perhaps 6 months in France -- But I&#x27;ve not lived there permanently, and haven&#x27;t really used the language in perhaps 10 years.<p>I&#x27;m at the point where I&#x27;d have a hard time following dialogue in a TV show (although, to be fair, that&#x27;s always hard for foreigners), but am rarely identified as american by native french-speakers; they usually guess German or something similar (more plausible to know French well, but still with the harder-edged anglo accent; I&#x27;m clearly not an Italian or Spaniard... well, okay, I AM Italian, but do not speak Italian).<p>Anyway, what I mean to say is my background with the language is complicated, and my french is far from perfect. Typically I managed in the 80-100% range depending on words.<p>Anybody know the goal of the project?

French is also a bit of a minefield in terms of phrasing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a69toGGjoO0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a69toGGjoO0</a>

Really great concept - I feel the UI needs some work, there were a lot of times where it showed an &quot;x&quot; and didnt give me a score - I assume this means its having trouble hearing me. Some sort of distance or volume indicator would be great.<p>As a Canadian I&#x27;m a bit surprised though as all the words it was able to detect I got 100% scores - I know a lot of the Quebecois french pronunciations we learn in Canada are very different than French from France so it&#x27;d be interesting to hear how that is taken into account.<p>I really hope they keep going on this project as mastering accents is one of the largest gaps right now in online language learning and market leaders either lack the feature all together (like Duolingo) or do a rubbish job of it and charge a fortune (like Rosetta Stone).

Any love for the difference between French and Quebec?

Very cool! I&#x27;ve been looking for something like this to improve pronunciation in other languages. The next best thing I have is to change the input language on iOS and try to talk to Siri. One could certainly do the same thing on Android&#x2F;Google Now, but keep in mind not all voice recognition&#x2F;synthesis is equal between languages.

My employer&#x27;s proxy blocks this site as &quot;malicious.&quot; I suspect it&#x27;s a false positive but on the off chance that the proxy actually has a way to detect this I figured I&#x27;d share.

This chap would get top marks with this app: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dzbgpGuX6-s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dzbgpGuX6-s</a>

It seems to either not recognize the phrase at all, or it says my accent is perfect. Since I&#x27;m an American, I&#x27;m doubtful about the accuracy.

Very interesting, thanks for posting this to be able to check it out. Now I get to find out how far I&#x27;ve fallen since passing the Paris Chamber of Commerce non-native business French test. Reminds me that I haven&#x27;t listened to any streaming French radio in too long, which was a trick I used to re-up my comprehension and vocab from time to time. Super chouette app!

Haha just had a little competition with my [redacted] wife. I sound more [redacted] than her with my Basil Fawlty-style accent!<p>She is not impressed ;)

Is there a similar app for English? As I learn English mostly from reading, I mispronounce a lot of words.

I was disappointed!<p>Reading through the comments, before loading the page itself, I got really interested. Finally I clicked on the page just to find out that it is for Apple devices only. Quelle discrimination in the age of HTML5! If I only had a button to down-vote!

Interestingly I&#x27;ve never studied French, nor have I spent any significant amount of time hearing it, and I somehow get 100% on basically every word using my horrible childrens cartoon version of a French accent. Huh.

I was kind of hoping for a Pepe Le Pew[1] cartoon, at the very least. :)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pepé_Le_Pew" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pepé_Le_Pew</a>

The best french accent I&#x27;ve heard in a movie is from Sacha Baron Cohen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;yv7UJLOyERs?t=17" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;yv7UJLOyERs?t=17</a>

Any english alternative ?

It works from a native french point of view, no false negative !

That&#x27;s fun! It seems that it depends how far you talk from the mic. Otherwise It&#x27;s pretty accurate. Is there a certain speed I have to talk?

That&#x27;s a good idea to use speech recognition software to give feedback for foreign language leaners.

For people who&#x27;re blocked via proxy, just go on the app store and search for FrenchMeter.

Alright, but what if I want to speak English with a French accent? Can this app help me??

I&#x27;d love to connect with you @montbonnot - my email is in my profile

Anyone know how this works?

Funny, maybe cute, but not very useful if you&#x27;re actually trying to learn a new language.<p>Having &quot;perfect&quot; accent is pointless. When learning a new language you should aim for learning grammar, understanding basic pronunciation, but not &quot;speaking with native accent&quot;. That&#x27;s pointless, unless you&#x27;re a spy[1] (Look the answer to &quot;Q: Is it possible to acquire a language to a &quot;native&quot; level?&quot;).<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themoscowtimes.com&#x2F;article.php?id=517093" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themoscowtimes.com&#x2F;article.php?id=517093</a>

It&#x27;d be interesting to see accents from Northern, Southern France, Paris, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec compared... I&#x27;d reckon there&#x27;s more variation than people think.

Tried the app very buggy ! good start kids !