Audio Collection of French words

The "Audio Collection of French words" is a collection of audio recordings which contains about 14 000 French words and expressions.

The content of this collection is distributed under the ""Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States"" licence.

These audio files are primarily meant to study French as a foreign language and to help creating teaching material.

The Project

All the words used in the collection are taken from the free bilingual French-English dictionnary distributed by Freedict.org.

Nouns have been preceded by one or more articles. The choice of the article depended on the nature of the nouns : the most neutral form has been chosen, i.e. often the indefinite article. When it could change the meaning of a noun, several articles have been chosen. For example, "un bassin" (a place in which you can bathe), "le bassin" (anatomy); "le centre", "un centre"...)

Uncountable nouns have usually been recorded using both the definite article and the quantifying article : "du basilic" and "le basilic".

All nouns have been recorded with an article indicating the gender of the noun (masculine or feminine).

A couple of phrases and expressions have also been recorded ("s'il vous plaît", "faire allusion", "tout à l'heure"...).

The recordings were made using the Shtooka Recorder software, a good external soundcard and a SM58 microphone.

Pronunciation

Other voices will enlarge this collection in the future, but for now, all the audio files have been recorded by the same person. This person has grown up near Paris and is a French native speaker.

Each word may be pronounced differently according to the area and to the people. All these differences represent the 'real' spoken language and are then relevant to the project. Some words in the collection may then slightly differ from the academic pronunciation rules. Among those differences, we may mention :

• General phonetic differences : The following phonetic symbols may be considered equivalent :
• /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/ (brin/brun)
• /a/ and /ɑ/ (patte/pâte)
• Particular differences :
• "abasourdir" : According to the academic pronunciation rules, this word shoudld be pronounced /a.ba.zuʁ.diʁ/, i.e. with the /z/ sound (as in "poison") and not the /s/ sound (as in "poisson")

Distribution

The database will very likely be enriched by additional recordings in the future.

If by chance you were to find a mistake, please report it on the forum.

Online Consultation

You can consult the collections online by using the web interface:

• Online consultation.

  

Software for consultation

You can consult this audio collection and other packages (Chinese, Russian, English, Dutch, Swedish, Czech...) (with a total of more than 45 000 words) by using the Shtooka Explorer program which is freely available under a GPL license.

You will be able to install these collections on your computer and consult them offline.

• Download this collection from www.swac-collections.org (please, choose the "fra-balm-voc" package)