French minimal pairs: which word did you hear?

Why these three sounds

Your ear only keeps the distinctions your first language uses. Punjabi does not use these three, so French runs them together for you — not because you are not listening, but because there was never any reason to listen for them before.

The u in tu does not exist in Punjabi or English. It is made by holding your tongue where it sits for ee and rounding your lips as if for oo. Without that habit the sound collapses into plain oo, and tu becomes tout, rue becomes roue, dessus becomes dessous — the last pair being opposites.

Nasal vowels cause two problems at once. French has three of them — vin, vent, vont — where a Punjabi ear tends to hear one nasal blur. And where French only nasalises the vowel, we add a full n after it: bon has no n sound at all, while bonne does. That single difference is how a listener knows whether you are describing a man or a woman, a chien or a chienne.

s between two vowels is a z. One s buzzes, two s hiss, and nothing in the spelling of Punjabi prepares you to care. It is the difference between poisson and poison, and between dessert and désert.

How to use this

Discrimination before production. You cannot reliably say a sound you cannot hear, and hearing is much cheaper to train — a few minutes of picking between two words does more than an hour of repeating after a recording. Once a pair stops fooling you, say both words yourself and check that they still feel different in your mouth.

The drill uses your device's own French voice, so nothing is downloaded and nothing is recorded. If your browser has no French voice the drill hides itself and the table below is the whole page — every pair, its sounds, its meaning, and how to tell them apart.

The pairs

35 pairs across 5 sounds: u vs ou (/y/ vs /u/) (9), nasal vowel vs pronounced n (8), in / an / on (/ɛ̃/ /ɑ̃/ /ɔ̃/) (8), s vs z between vowels (6), eu/o and é/è (4). Read down the last column if you would rather study than play.

Last updated 2026-07-26. A pair you keep getting wrong that is not here? Tell us — this list grows from what learners actually mishear.

Work on the sounds themselves

• French pronunciation, complete guideGuide
• French vowel sounds, with word listsA2
• Mistakes Punjabi speakers makeGame
• Practise noun genderGame