The French Accent
The reason why French sounds the way it does and why French students find pronunciation so difficult in the beginning is that, unlike most Romance languages that have only five vowels sounds, French has sixteen vowel sounds, four of which are nasalized variants. English is the only other common world language that has as many vowel sounds as French, most of which are the same. Additionally, the consonant sounds are the same. You may be asking why, then, is pronunciation so difficult if the vowels are the same. The answer is the French accent.
The French accent colors the vowel sounds, and to a lesser extent, the consonant sounds, that we English speakers easily recognize, but when we try to reproduce the color of the French accent, we ultimately fall short the first few times. In order to better reproduce the difference in color, we need to take a closer look at how the French speech mechanism functions differently than ours. I recommend going to TF1.fr and watching a news broadcast and paying close attention to the newscasters' mouth, and most importantly the lips. What do you notice?
After watching the videos, there are few strategies to keep in mind that will help you produce all sixteen vowel sounds accurately, and thus help improve your overall French accent.
The first thing to think about is precision. Did you notice that the presenters rarely, if at all, opened their mouths more than a couple finger-widths apart?
Because the French vowel sounds are so close to one another, it takes a great deal of control to be able to differentiate each vowel accurately. In order to execute this level of precision, the mouth usually stays almost completely closed with just the lips moving enough to show the teeth and thus, control the amount of air that escapes, carrying the properly formed sound. Additionally, since most of the French vowel sounds are tightly rounded, by keeping your lips close together, quickly going from an open position to a rounded one and vice versa will take much less effort.
As your accuracy improves, you will be able to maintain the precision and clarity of the vowel sound even if you are being expressive or yelling with your mouth wide open.
Fortunately, it is much easier for us English speakers to learn control and tighten the muscles that control the speech mechanism than it is for French speakers to learn how to loosen up their mechanism to imitate a native English accent.