Hear the joins: liaison, élision, enchaînement
P44.ear-training.02 · Audience: guest, language-pro, it-ml · Prerequisites: Hear what you don't yet produce
Spoken French does not deliver words one at a time; it delivers breath groups where words glue together. Les amis arrives as one block with a [z] in the middle; et après arrives as two, because et never lets a liaison through; les héros keeps its gap because the h of héros is aspirated. If your ear does not track these joins, you lose word boundaries exactly where B2 audio speeds up.
Three phenomena to tell apart:
- Liaison — a normally silent final consonant sounds before a vowel: les‿amis, un grand‿homme (and note the [d] → [t]).
- Élision — a vowel drops and the words fuse in writing too: l'école, j'ai.
- Enchaînement — an already-pronounced final consonant simply re-attaches: il‿arrive heard as i-la-rrive.
Listen to each fragment and answer what your ear caught. The rules you drilled in the P51 reminder deck (liaison after et, the h aspiré) are now a listening skill, not a card.
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