Sound drill: élision

Unité PO-12 · campagne 7 · l', d', qu', n'.

Élision is the one linking rule you can actually see in writing: before a vowel or a mute h, the small grammatical words drop their own vowel and attach to the next word as l', d', qu', n'. Saying them as separate full syllables undoes the flow French expects. The model below carries three of them — j'ai, l'ami, qu'il — and none of the three may be said as two separate words. The other two behave identically: de becomes d' in le prix d'entrée, and ne becomes n' in je n'ai rien dit — where saying ne ai would be as wrong as saying le ami.

Like liaison, élision stops before an h aspiré: you say le héros and la haine with the vowel intact, never l'héros or l'haine, exactly where l'homme and l'heure do élide. Record the model and let each élided word lean onto the word that follows.

Checking your progress...