Finessing Your French

Most people, when they arrive in France, have enough French to negotiate shopping adequately enough. Je voudrais ('I would like') followed by reading the name of the item off the label and pointing will get you what you want most of the time. The trickiest bits of the transaction when you are a newbie are remembering to say bonjour before making your request and working out how much it is if you have bought multiple items and there isn't a cash register readout to take a sneaky peak at.

Fairly soon, especially if you live here, you realise that shopkeepers and market stallholders are asking you questions too. Usually these questions are easy to get the gist of because of the context, but what are they actually saying?

• avec ceci? -- literally 'with that?', meaning 'anything else?' The problem is it sounds like avec soucis?, which would mean 'with worries?' and doesn't make any sense at all. This one had me so bemused in the early days that I eventually asked a bilingual friend to explain.
• ce sera tout? -- literally 'that will be all?', meaning 'will that be all?' This one sounds like ça ce ratou, but 'ratou' isn't actually a French word, so it doesn't mean anything. It took me ages, but I did eventually figure this one out myself. It can also be used as your response when asked 'avec ceci?' -- 'non, ce sera tout, merci'.
• ça va aller? -- literally 'that's going to go?', meaning 'is that alright?' You hear it a lot, not just at the market, and it too can be either a question or a response depending on intonation. It usually sounds like ça va les, which I couldn't make mean anything particularly sensible, although I got very quickly that the phrase meant something similar to ça marche ('that works') when used as a statement. This one took me the longest to figure out, but it finally dawned on me, without having to ask anyone.

 And then there is the question of how to pronounce the names of the supermarkets. Here is my take on it:

• Auchan -- pronounced Oh-shuh, with the stress slightly on the second syllable. As an Anglophone you will really struggle not to give it a nasalised 'n' on the end, but try your best. It is not pronounced 'ocean', and doing so (not by me, thank goodness) has been known to make French people laugh.
• Carrefour -- pronounced Carr-foor, with a slight stress on the last syllable and a proper gargling French 'r' in the middle, but not too much 'r-ing' at the end. It is not pronounced 'carry four' or 'care for'.
• SuperU -- pronounced Su-pair-u, with fairly even stress on each syllable and the final 'u' pronounced so you are almost whistling. It is not pronounced 'super you'. The 'u' is a sound that doesn't exist in English and you will just have to listen to native speakers and practice it.
  
• Intermarché -- pronounced uhn-tair-mar-shay, with a slight stress on the last syllable. It is not pronounced 'intermarsh' or 'intermarshay'.
• LeClerc -- pronounced luh-klair, with the stress on the second syllable. It is not pronounced 'lee-clerk'.

Note: This is a reworking of a post I wrote more than a decade ago. The main changes I've made are to incorporate some points made on the original post by linguist Ken Broadhurst regarding how one could express in non-technical writing the pronunciation of the supermarket names.