Lack of phonetic transcriptions in French

Question

When I was learning English, every dictionary that I ever came across with, had a phonetic transcription, so I could easily understand how the word is pronounced. For example, phonetic transcription for a word knee would be [ni:]. I just started to learn French and I am really surprised by the lack of phonetic transcriptions for such a hard-to-learn language. How am I supposed to know the pronunciation, when half of the letters are silent?

Are there any good sources on the web, where I could look up phonetic transcription for any word? It really makes me uncomfortable when I don't know how the word is pronounced.

Answer 1

French pronunciation is more regular than English, even if the rules are complicated and do have exceptions. So natives and learners need pronunciation information less often than they do with English. Nonetheless most dictionaries do include phonetic transcriptions, so I'm a little puzzled why you feel a lack of those. (What doesn't exist for French is a wide collection of pronunciation dictionaries. Most words have a single pronunciation.)

Online, Wiktionnaire has a wide collection of words and usually includes phonetic transcriptions, so it's a good resource for pronunciation, even if its definitions are often lacking. It's also worth mentioning projet Shtooka¹ ², a database of audio snippets of French natives pronouncing single words (and a few expressions).

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¹ _{Thanks to F'x for introducing me to it.}
² _{Project Shtooka is (as of 2012-06-10) in deep coma, see meta(fr) for details}

Answer 2

Lexique is a database of french words which gives the prononciation of each word.

Answer 3

I just wanted to mention an online resource available for the purpose of automating these things, or maybe just for a tech-savy way of having an immediate pronounced example.

Google has an API for that, called "text-to-speech", and it has a french parameter available, which produces quite good results, at least for the vast majority of sentences I tested.

For an example, try this directly in your browser's URL bar :

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=fr&q=Excellente%20prononciation

Technically, Google sends you back an mp3 in response to your request to TTS. It means the result may depend on the way your browser handles this type of content (direct play with plug-ins, download of a mp3 file, or link to an external mp3 reader application, like winamp or other). With many standard and up-to-date browsers, chances are it will directly play without you doing any additional tasks. But again warning, the feature is browser-dependent.

(Side note : one fun and possibly useful thing about this is that you can test the french pronounciation of any character string, including words you're making up on purpose.)