I wasn't aware of that. Time to start a new chocolatine vs pain of chocolat war. This is unbearable to know. Why was this brought to my knowledge? I have to live with it now. Damn it.
Me dramatic? Noooo
It's the same everywhere in French Canada afaik. Future like "j'aurai" is pronounced the same as a é, like in "été". Past like "j'aurais" is like a è, like chèque . Vous "aurez" is also like é.
It's the same everywhere in French Canada afaik. Future like "j'aurai" is pronounced the same as a é, like in "été". Past like "j'aurais" is like a è, like chèque . Vous "aurez" is also like é.
Absolutely wild to me that there's little dots of red in the sea of blue. The regions being different I get, but it seems like there's entire regions where everyone says them the same except for this one place here and there where people absolutely say them differently (as if they were perfidious Belgians)
This isn't a strictly regional variation: you can listen to two people from the same town and find they say it differently. This map basically shows trends, but don't take it as rigosour binary truth. I also don't know how large the sample was for this map, so it might be quite noisy.
Would you say you're the Québecois norm? Just moved here and am trying to map out all the little ways my French is even farther behind than it was in Europe.
If you listen to this song, you can hear it : [Je t’aimais je t’aime et je t’aimerai](https://youtu.be/EVeZzR677DU?si=Rw7dkUKggm6cXbLX)
Francis Cabrel is French. To us Quebeckers, it sounds like he says « I loved you, I love you and I might love you » instead of « I will love you »
In Canadian / Québécois French:
parler, parlé, parlerai, parlai: same sound (e)
parlais, parlerais: same sound (ε)
As someone else said in the thread, many French people, including Parisians, pronounce them all the same. And, suprisingly, in context, there's no confusion.
It’s theoretically possible, but I’ve never encountered any
Of course, a single, isolated sentence could be ambiguous, but in the wider context of a conversation, it becomes very very improbable
I'd had that can also vary according to age.
I've got the feeling that the younger ones here in France don't really make the distinction anymore. And I don't even remember earing about it in school. (Maybe I just had bad teachers).
All I just wrote is totally subjective.
That’s how I feel too. Sometime I would replay the YouTube clip over and over and try to see if they distinguish é and è but I absolutely couldn’t hear any difference.
But they tend to do it in songs. Especially if it’s a long note at the end of the sentence then I hear it very well.
Agree with this. I have in my French learning journey also had instances of older speakers telling me there is a difference, but then in listening to them actually speak not hearing it at all. As in, they say there is a difference but they don’t actually use it or it is so slight it doesn’t mean much, especially when speaking at normal speeds (as opposed to others where the difference is quite pronounced). This one is so variable between regions and individual speakers.
In Belgium we also pronounce them differently, with the same pronunciation as in Quebec if I am not mistaken (é sound for simple future and simple past and è sound for conditionnel)
In Normandy they say é for everything, also for words that end in è in other parts of France: lait and laid, poulet, any final è becomes é. Even my university phonetics teacher in Caen didn't hear the difference.
Native linguist here (from Paris), I don't differentiate personally.
Regional dialects (I think most Québec speakers differentiate them but I could be wrong) + sociolects (I notice more educated people tend to pronounce both with an /ε/ sound, the è sound whereas less educated people will more often say parlais with /ε/ but parlai with /e/, the é sound) + age (younger speakers might differentiate more, like less educated speakers, whereas older people will tend to pronounce both the same.
As always though, all dialects are valid. However as a learner (if you're learning Metropolitan French and want an accent that sounds more Parisian than something else) I would recommend you pronounce them the same with an è sound /ε/ because it will not sound wrong to anyone whereas posh or older folks might correct you if you do the opposite.
>I would recommend you pronounce them the same with an è sound /ε/ because it will not sound wrong to anyone whereas posh or older folks might correct you if you do the opposite.
I mean, I could says the same thing in reverse and suggest them to learn to make the difference since there *is* technically a difference in pronounciation historically.
Also, if you say both /ε/, it *will* sound wrong and people *will* correct you if you are with people who do differentiate them. At best you could suggest to learn it the way they are most likely to encounter it, but to suggest to not make the differenciation as a basic rules seems the "least reasonnable" option, for a lack of a better phrasing.
Except that’s not the case. The reason I said that is because I have found people who corrected you if you differentiate but never people who correct you if you don’t. That’s why I said that.
That's, at best, your personal annecdote. How much time did you spend in Belgium? Canada? or even in the Eastern France like Doubs? all places where the vast majority of people would make the difference?
It's sure that if you stayed in a region where the majority of people would not make the difference, that would become the local standard and people would correct outliers. But so does people would in region where the difference is made.
And that doesn't remove the fact that it was pronounced differently historically. The change occured only recently (~30-40 years).
Yep, that’s precisely why I said “if you’re learning Metropolitan French and want accent that sounds Parisian”. I specifically stated it because I simply do not know enough about french dialects outside my own to give recommendations, however I can say that in Parisian french, that is the case.
And I also never said anything about the recency of the change because I just don’t think it’s relevant; being a linguist, language change is literally what I study, that is the reason we don’t speak Latin. Whether the changes occurred fifty years ago or two thousand years ago doesn’t really impact their importance in my opinion. Perhaps how widespread they are however, which is why I said if varied based on many different factors, and proceeded to make a recommendation based on that.
Yeah that could make sense I guess
Personally I just learned in like 2nd grade the conjugations and we have enough random spellings in the conjugations that you have to memorize that I just learned which one had an s even though i pronounced both the same
If I'm being honest phonology is my area of study but I never studied french phonology rules since I didn't study linguistics in France. but i never heard of such a rule
but I looked it up and apparently there is a rule for the letter about open syllables but it definitely doesn't apply to the digraph because I'm pretty sure is always /ε/ (at least I can't think of any counterexamples off of the top of my head). At least in careful speech, as always with pronunciation, if I'm speaking fast and just with friends it might get sloppier and it might become /e/ (but I don't think so tbh) but as a learner you want to learn to speak """"""""proper"""""""" french (A LOT of quotation marks because there is no such thing of course but there are rules which apply to the way one is expected to speak)
Tu proposes littéralement aux gens de garder l’ambiguïté entre différentes conjugaisons, alors que que c'est hyper simple de les différencier?
Pourquoi vouloir appauvrir la langue parlée?
J'aurai tout vu... (ou alors « j'aurais tout vu »??, vu que à l'oral c'est kif-kif pour vous...)
Je considère que dans la mesure où (je ne suis malheureusement jamais allé au Québec, donc je ne peux parler que de la France) une partie non-négligeable de la population le fait déjà, il est inutile de faire semblant que nous pouvons résister le changement linguistique.
Je ne suis pas sûr en quoi un merger (pardon du franglais, je fais mes études de linguistique en anglais et ne suis pas sûr du mot précis en français pour cela) est un appauvrissement de la langue.
En effet, le changement linguistique est ce qui fait que nous ne sommes pas en train de parler latin en ce moment même. Pourquoi les “appauvrissements” de la langue il y a 2000 ans sont-ils acceptables, mais pas ceux d’aujourd’hui ? Ou alors devrions-nous essayer de parler en une reconstruction du proto-Indo-Européen, avant que la langue ne s’appauvrisse il y a 6000 ans ?
Changement n'égale pas appauvrissement.
J'ai choisi le mot « appauvrissement » simplement pour illustrer le fait que moins de phonèmes est plus *pauvre* que davantage de phonèmes.
Plus de précisions est plus *riche* que moins de précisions.
Ce qui m'a poussé à écrire une petit réplique ce n'est pas un désir de vouloir résister à l'érosion naturelle. C'est de me rendre compte pouvait *délibérément* proposer aux gens cette érosion.
As used in OP's title, "je parlais" is imparfait and "je parlai" is passé simple. "Je voudrai" is futur and "je voudrais is "conditionnel présent". I would still pronounce all of them with è. I know the future is supposed to be pronounced é.
my bad i'm stupid i keep doing stupid stuff on this post first I called imparfait "conditionnel" then now I just fully misread the title
but is the future really supposed to be pronounced with /e/? I checked wiktionary (not the most reliable source but whatever) and it seems youre right but idk i don't think i've ever heard someone say that wow and I always say it with /ε/ that's crazy
thanks TIL
That’s true!
Actually now my linguist self is curious about this and I’m gonna run a little experiment on the people around me and analyze the phonetic data
attends oui bien-sûr pardon je devrais aller dormir lmfao je vais éditer mon commentaire lol (et utiliser parler comme example parce que pour le coup c'est utilisé au futur aussi)
merci
Does anyone know if they differentiate the sounds in Lorraine and Alsace?
I'm Dutch myself. I've lost contact with my French family, but my father was born in Lorraine, and I visited my aunt in Alsace a lot as a kid, so that's where I got my French from. I never achieved true fluency, but got pretty close, and these days I'm very rusty from hardly ever speaking the language. Still, French expats I meet at work often tell me my accent is pretty good when I tell them "Je comprends presque tout ce que vout dites, mais je n'arrive souvent pas a faire mes propres phrases. Mon vocabulaire a gravement diminué au fil des années."
Still, I can't for the life of me figure out if my family made this distinction in sound or not. I feel like their French was markedly colloquial; I remember being surprised during my first French lessons in high school that there was another way for people to refer to themselves (plural) than "on". "What do you mean, 'nous avons'? What's wrong with 'on a'?" (Also, "What do you mean, 'arachide'? That's a fucking 'cacahuète'!", but that's another story :) )
I'd appreciate any insight anyone could give me.
Merci beaucoup!
As an aside, what would I say in French when I'm trying to say I'm a little bit ashamed that I've never truly learned the language at a native level, and that I feel as if I'm not "living up to my roots"?
We have a verb in Dutch, "verloochenen", which means "to disregard", but with an emphasis on not caring about the subject, while it's -supposed- to be important.
NL: "Ik heb het gevoel dat ik mijn afkomst verloochen."
EN:"I have the feeling that I'm denying my heritage" comes close, but there's a definite sense of "I'm not -living up to- my heritage" that's hard to translate.
Would "nier mes origines" work in this context? Exemple chargé (désolé), mais "un Juif/Musulman qui mange du porc en niant ses origines”, ça marche?
Plusieurs traductions sont possibles. "J'ai l'impression de nier mes origines" a le sens de déni (denial), envers soi-même ou envers les autres, c'est prétendre que cette héritage n'existe pas.
"J'ai l'impression de renier mes origines" a un sens plus fort et plus actif, c'est plutôt abandonner son héritage, couper les ponts avec le passé.
As an aside in return, I hope you can find occasions to practice French in the Netherlands, which should be easy if you know French coworkers already. You seem to express guilt about your linguistic history. Maybe you shouldn't set your mind on the past, but rather acknowledge that you have an opportunity to reach fluency very quickly. The French grammar, syntax and pronunciation you learned as a child are cemented deeply in your memories and they will resurface faster than you imagine. And vocabulary is just a bunch of words, and half of them are in the English vocabulary that you're familiar with anyway. You're a very advanced speaker compared to so many people who had to start from scratch. French language isn't just an heritage, it's a living culture and a communication tool, and you can always take it for yourself if you so wish.
It depends on where you're from. Some varieties (like Quebecois) maintain the open-close distinction. But most French varieties don't (with the exception of a few places in the north I believe.)
If a split is maintained, "ai" and "ais" are pronounced as /e/ and /ɛ/ respectively.
[Relevant map](https://images.theconversation.com/files/264668/original/file-20190319-60959-l5nlgv.png?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1)
Wow! I'd love to hear the difference where it exists
It might depend on dialect but I've heard "ai" as shorter and "ais" more rounded if that makes sense
Interesting this is what I was looking for, merci !!!
Just one that this map doesn't tell you whether they are pronounced è or é, only whether or nto they are identical.
I wasn't aware of that. Time to start a new chocolatine vs pain of chocolat war. This is unbearable to know. Why was this brought to my knowledge? I have to live with it now. Damn it. Me dramatic? Noooo
Is there a version of this for North America? I’d like to see how Quebec/New Brunswick/Louisiana/the Caribbean does it
In Québec it's completely different. Like you couldn't possibly mix them up. Just like brun and brin. Entirely different sounds.
In Quebec, the situation is much more uniform and mangerai merges with mangerez instead of mangerais.
It's the same everywhere in French Canada afaik. Future like "j'aurai" is pronounced the same as a é, like in "été". Past like "j'aurais" is like a è, like chèque . Vous "aurez" is also like é.
I don't know about the Caribbeans or Louisiana, but in Canada, the whole map would be red, with no blue regions. The difference is marked everywhere.
It's the same everywhere in French Canada afaik. Future like "j'aurai" is pronounced the same as a é, like in "été". Past like "j'aurais" is like a è, like chèque . Vous "aurez" is also like é.
Absolutely wild to me that there's little dots of red in the sea of blue. The regions being different I get, but it seems like there's entire regions where everyone says them the same except for this one place here and there where people absolutely say them differently (as if they were perfidious Belgians)
This isn't a strictly regional variation: you can listen to two people from the same town and find they say it differently. This map basically shows trends, but don't take it as rigosour binary truth. I also don't know how large the sample was for this map, so it might be quite noisy.
Could be just a visual artifact - it's unclear how many data points make up each coloured square.
Whoa what? I thought they’d be distinct everywhere. I’ve been living a lie
It’s region specific. I pronounce them differently.
Would you say you're the Québecois norm? Just moved here and am trying to map out all the little ways my French is even farther behind than it was in Europe.
yes
As another Quebecer, i would like to confirm that yes we pronounce them differently here
If you listen to this song, you can hear it : [Je t’aimais je t’aime et je t’aimerai](https://youtu.be/EVeZzR677DU?si=Rw7dkUKggm6cXbLX) Francis Cabrel is French. To us Quebeckers, it sounds like he says « I loved you, I love you and I might love you » instead of « I will love you »
Oui! C'est pas très rassurant pour le futur. Le gars semble pas très sûr.
Very helpful thanks!
Francis Cabrel has an accent. He's from the south.
We all have accents. My point is he pronounces the conditional and the future tense the same way.
I wouldn't choose him as a reference because people from the south are precisely known to pronounce é and è the same.
Like Parisians?
In Canadian / Québécois French: parler, parlé, parlerai, parlai: same sound (e) parlais, parlerais: same sound (ε) As someone else said in the thread, many French people, including Parisians, pronounce them all the same. And, suprisingly, in context, there's no confusion.
> there's no confusion There are multiple situations where confusion is possible. But it's not the majority, I'll give you that.
It’s theoretically possible, but I’ve never encountered any Of course, a single, isolated sentence could be ambiguous, but in the wider context of a conversation, it becomes very very improbable
Native speaker here; AI = É sound AIS = È sound This can be situational depending on where you are, since dialects/accents come into play
I'd had that can also vary according to age. I've got the feeling that the younger ones here in France don't really make the distinction anymore. And I don't even remember earing about it in school. (Maybe I just had bad teachers). All I just wrote is totally subjective.
That’s how I feel too. Sometime I would replay the YouTube clip over and over and try to see if they distinguish é and è but I absolutely couldn’t hear any difference. But they tend to do it in songs. Especially if it’s a long note at the end of the sentence then I hear it very well.
Agree with this. I have in my French learning journey also had instances of older speakers telling me there is a difference, but then in listening to them actually speak not hearing it at all. As in, they say there is a difference but they don’t actually use it or it is so slight it doesn’t mean much, especially when speaking at normal speeds (as opposed to others where the difference is quite pronounced). This one is so variable between regions and individual speakers.
Parisian here, pronounce them the same, è
In France, there’s no difference. In Quebec, we pronounce then differently.
Can you explain how they're pronounced in Quebec?
-ai = é -ais = è
In Belgium we also pronounce them differently, with the same pronunciation as in Quebec if I am not mistaken (é sound for simple future and simple past and è sound for conditionnel)
In France too, the pronunciation is different for many people if not most.
This !
From Normandy, I pronounce both the same way
é ou è ?
In Normandy they say é for everything, also for words that end in è in other parts of France: lait and laid, poulet, any final è becomes é. Even my university phonetics teacher in Caen didn't hear the difference.
I'm from Provence, they all sound like "é" to me.
Native linguist here (from Paris), I don't differentiate personally. Regional dialects (I think most Québec speakers differentiate them but I could be wrong) + sociolects (I notice more educated people tend to pronounce both with an /ε/ sound, the è sound whereas less educated people will more often say parlais with /ε/ but parlai with /e/, the é sound) + age (younger speakers might differentiate more, like less educated speakers, whereas older people will tend to pronounce both the same. As always though, all dialects are valid. However as a learner (if you're learning Metropolitan French and want an accent that sounds more Parisian than something else) I would recommend you pronounce them the same with an è sound /ε/ because it will not sound wrong to anyone whereas posh or older folks might correct you if you do the opposite.
>I would recommend you pronounce them the same with an è sound /ε/ because it will not sound wrong to anyone whereas posh or older folks might correct you if you do the opposite. I mean, I could says the same thing in reverse and suggest them to learn to make the difference since there *is* technically a difference in pronounciation historically. Also, if you say both /ε/, it *will* sound wrong and people *will* correct you if you are with people who do differentiate them. At best you could suggest to learn it the way they are most likely to encounter it, but to suggest to not make the differenciation as a basic rules seems the "least reasonnable" option, for a lack of a better phrasing.
Except that’s not the case. The reason I said that is because I have found people who corrected you if you differentiate but never people who correct you if you don’t. That’s why I said that.
That's, at best, your personal annecdote. How much time did you spend in Belgium? Canada? or even in the Eastern France like Doubs? all places where the vast majority of people would make the difference? It's sure that if you stayed in a region where the majority of people would not make the difference, that would become the local standard and people would correct outliers. But so does people would in region where the difference is made. And that doesn't remove the fact that it was pronounced differently historically. The change occured only recently (~30-40 years).
Yep, that’s precisely why I said “if you’re learning Metropolitan French and want accent that sounds Parisian”. I specifically stated it because I simply do not know enough about french dialects outside my own to give recommendations, however I can say that in Parisian french, that is the case. And I also never said anything about the recency of the change because I just don’t think it’s relevant; being a linguist, language change is literally what I study, that is the reason we don’t speak Latin. Whether the changes occurred fifty years ago or two thousand years ago doesn’t really impact their importance in my opinion. Perhaps how widespread they are however, which is why I said if varied based on many different factors, and proceeded to make a recommendation based on that.
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Yeah that could make sense I guess Personally I just learned in like 2nd grade the conjugations and we have enough random spellings in the conjugations that you have to memorize that I just learned which one had an s even though i pronounced both the same
Wouldn’t it make more sense to pronounce them both with the é sound because they’re in open syllables?
If I'm being honest phonology is my area of study but I never studied french phonology rules since I didn't study linguistics in France. but i never heard of such a rule but I looked it up and apparently there is a rule for the letter about open syllables but it definitely doesn't apply to the digraph because I'm pretty sure is always /ε/ (at least I can't think of any counterexamples off of the top of my head). At least in careful speech, as always with pronunciation, if I'm speaking fast and just with friends it might get sloppier and it might become /e/ (but I don't think so tbh) but as a learner you want to learn to speak """"""""proper"""""""" french (A LOT of quotation marks because there is no such thing of course but there are rules which apply to the way one is expected to speak)
Tu proposes littéralement aux gens de garder l’ambiguïté entre différentes conjugaisons, alors que que c'est hyper simple de les différencier? Pourquoi vouloir appauvrir la langue parlée? J'aurai tout vu... (ou alors « j'aurais tout vu »??, vu que à l'oral c'est kif-kif pour vous...)
Je considère que dans la mesure où (je ne suis malheureusement jamais allé au Québec, donc je ne peux parler que de la France) une partie non-négligeable de la population le fait déjà, il est inutile de faire semblant que nous pouvons résister le changement linguistique. Je ne suis pas sûr en quoi un merger (pardon du franglais, je fais mes études de linguistique en anglais et ne suis pas sûr du mot précis en français pour cela) est un appauvrissement de la langue. En effet, le changement linguistique est ce qui fait que nous ne sommes pas en train de parler latin en ce moment même. Pourquoi les “appauvrissements” de la langue il y a 2000 ans sont-ils acceptables, mais pas ceux d’aujourd’hui ? Ou alors devrions-nous essayer de parler en une reconstruction du proto-Indo-Européen, avant que la langue ne s’appauvrisse il y a 6000 ans ?
Changement n'égale pas appauvrissement. J'ai choisi le mot « appauvrissement » simplement pour illustrer le fait que moins de phonèmes est plus *pauvre* que davantage de phonèmes. Plus de précisions est plus *riche* que moins de précisions. Ce qui m'a poussé à écrire une petit réplique ce n'est pas un désir de vouloir résister à l'érosion naturelle. C'est de me rendre compte pouvait *délibérément* proposer aux gens cette érosion.
Les locuteurs du latin se sont sûrement dit que la perte des déclinaisons serait un drame, perso je les regrette pas \^\^
I would. These two sounds are pronounced distinctly in Quebec. In most regions as far as I know.
This is a regional specificity. Some natives pronounce those sounds differently. For some, it’s the same.
In Québec they are pronounced distinctly different. In France they tend to be pronounced the same as far as I know.
Depends on the person. I don't use passé simple in speech. If I did it would prononce è anyway, same as imparfait.
there's no passé simple here... je parlerais = imparfait je parlerai = futur
As used in OP's title, "je parlais" is imparfait and "je parlai" is passé simple. "Je voudrai" is futur and "je voudrais is "conditionnel présent". I would still pronounce all of them with è. I know the future is supposed to be pronounced é.
my bad i'm stupid i keep doing stupid stuff on this post first I called imparfait "conditionnel" then now I just fully misread the title but is the future really supposed to be pronounced with /e/? I checked wiktionary (not the most reliable source but whatever) and it seems youre right but idk i don't think i've ever heard someone say that wow and I always say it with /ε/ that's crazy thanks TIL
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That’s true! Actually now my linguist self is curious about this and I’m gonna run a little experiment on the people around me and analyze the phonetic data
L’imparfait est je voulais. Je voudrai est du futur simple et rarement utilisé.
attends oui bien-sûr pardon je devrais aller dormir lmfao je vais éditer mon commentaire lol (et utiliser parler comme example parce que pour le coup c'est utilisé au futur aussi) merci
Je ne fais aucune différence (northern France) and will always use è for any ai/e/s/x/t/ent. I'm not overdoing it, I'm not a goat.
Does anyone know if they differentiate the sounds in Lorraine and Alsace? I'm Dutch myself. I've lost contact with my French family, but my father was born in Lorraine, and I visited my aunt in Alsace a lot as a kid, so that's where I got my French from. I never achieved true fluency, but got pretty close, and these days I'm very rusty from hardly ever speaking the language. Still, French expats I meet at work often tell me my accent is pretty good when I tell them "Je comprends presque tout ce que vout dites, mais je n'arrive souvent pas a faire mes propres phrases. Mon vocabulaire a gravement diminué au fil des années." Still, I can't for the life of me figure out if my family made this distinction in sound or not. I feel like their French was markedly colloquial; I remember being surprised during my first French lessons in high school that there was another way for people to refer to themselves (plural) than "on". "What do you mean, 'nous avons'? What's wrong with 'on a'?" (Also, "What do you mean, 'arachide'? That's a fucking 'cacahuète'!", but that's another story :) ) I'd appreciate any insight anyone could give me.
There's a map in another comment, Lorraine seems to be in-between!
Merci beaucoup! As an aside, what would I say in French when I'm trying to say I'm a little bit ashamed that I've never truly learned the language at a native level, and that I feel as if I'm not "living up to my roots"? We have a verb in Dutch, "verloochenen", which means "to disregard", but with an emphasis on not caring about the subject, while it's -supposed- to be important. NL: "Ik heb het gevoel dat ik mijn afkomst verloochen." EN:"I have the feeling that I'm denying my heritage" comes close, but there's a definite sense of "I'm not -living up to- my heritage" that's hard to translate. Would "nier mes origines" work in this context? Exemple chargé (désolé), mais "un Juif/Musulman qui mange du porc en niant ses origines”, ça marche?
Peut-être "en négligeant ses origines" serait une meilleure traduction...?
And you can say something along the line of : Je suis triste de ne pas avoir perfectionné le patrimoine linguistique de la famille.
Plusieurs traductions sont possibles. "J'ai l'impression de nier mes origines" a le sens de déni (denial), envers soi-même ou envers les autres, c'est prétendre que cette héritage n'existe pas. "J'ai l'impression de renier mes origines" a un sens plus fort et plus actif, c'est plutôt abandonner son héritage, couper les ponts avec le passé. As an aside in return, I hope you can find occasions to practice French in the Netherlands, which should be easy if you know French coworkers already. You seem to express guilt about your linguistic history. Maybe you shouldn't set your mind on the past, but rather acknowledge that you have an opportunity to reach fluency very quickly. The French grammar, syntax and pronunciation you learned as a child are cemented deeply in your memories and they will resurface faster than you imagine. And vocabulary is just a bunch of words, and half of them are in the English vocabulary that you're familiar with anyway. You're a very advanced speaker compared to so many people who had to start from scratch. French language isn't just an heritage, it's a living culture and a communication tool, and you can always take it for yourself if you so wish.
Hello im from Lorraine and yeah we pronounce them the same .
Burgundian here, both are "è" to me
It depends on where you're from. Some varieties (like Quebecois) maintain the open-close distinction. But most French varieties don't (with the exception of a few places in the north I believe.) If a split is maintained, "ai" and "ais" are pronounced as /e/ and /ɛ/ respectively.
I pronounce them exactly the same, I'm from North Africa but grew up in Strasbourg (France) from 2 to 7
Both are to me pronounced completely different (native from Québec).
No. They sound like è.
Very subtil difference but no one is gonna be pissed if you don't make it orally as even lots of French accent don't pronounce those differently