I just started learning French, and I came across the word enfant. The question I have concerns this word's pronunciation. I looked in the dictionary, and it said /ɑ̃fɑ̃/, which is supposed to sound like "amfam" ("am" as in the word champ and "f" as in the word flip or "at).
Is that really the correct way to say it? Whenever I hear the word in online dictionaries, I can clearly hear a hard "n" and not an "m" like in "amfam."
Actually to pronounce "enfant" you can put your tongue completely into sleeping mode. Don't try to pronounce any "hard n" or "m" or other consonant except for for the "f".
Other than that, what the comments under your post says is right, pronounce it like the little word "en".
Other examples of the pronunciation of both "en" and "ant" can be found in following words:
"grand" (tall) "gens" (peoples) "empathie" (empathy) "France"
I hope I could help!
I had a lot of trouble to explain how to pronounce this to my Chinese friend. I went with the following explanation:
First you have 3 nasalized vowels sound:
an, on and in each one derived from the vowels a, o and è respectively. (en actually pronounce very similarly to an, I would not do the distinction as beginner)
To pronounce the n sound you let air go trough your nose. For those you need to put the front of your mouth in the position you would to pronounce the associated vowels (a -> an, o -> on and è -> in) and arrange the back of the mouth let air go trough your nose like for n.
It is quite hard to explain how to do it but I hope this help.
