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French Words for Beauty | Rosetta Stone®

Learn various French words for “beauty”, plus other words and phrases using the award-winning Rosetta Stone app.

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How to Say Beauty in French

If you want to say “beauty” in French, the word is literally “la beauté.” Trying to describe someone or something as beautiful? When describing a person or object, you would generally say “beau” for men (or masculine object) and “belle” for woman (or feminine object). You can also describe men, women, or things as pretty by referring to them as either “joli” (for men or masculine objects) or “jolie” (for women or feminine objects).

How you approach learning French depends on your objectives. Many early learners begin their journey by picking up common words and phrases and trying to replicate the infamous French accent—perfecting amour, beau, belle, joli, jolie, merci, and more. Other learners may be coming back to French after years of exposure to the language in their school life. Whatever your goals are for taking on French, you should absolutely consider a language-learning program built with your goals in mind.

Rosetta Stone has experience in designing language-learning programs that build confidence in speaking and understanding French. Whether you’re a beginner or an intermediate French speaker looking to advance your fluency, Rosetta Stone can help. With an immersive approach that focuses on contextualising learning, Rosetta Stone uses an award-winning mobile app to deliver bite-sized lessons that help you learn French anytime and anywhere.

Learning French

When you first begin to learn the French language, you may be tempted to wade into memorising long lists of vocabulary words. But simply memorising words isn’t a very effective way to learn French. Instead of trying to memorise as many French words as you can, consider first learning just a few of the most commonly used phrases and focusing on correct French pronunciation. After all, the goal of learning a new language is not vocabulary acquisition. Rather, the goal is to achieve a level of comfort and confidence needed to have conversations in French. 

You will find that there are commonly used French words and conversational phrases that make up the backbone of the language. Learning these common words and phrases will give you a solid foundation. These words and phrases are not just the greetings like “Bonjour” or “S’il vous plaît” that you will often use in everyday situations. Beyond greetings, it’s also smart to learn the words that native French speakers sprinkle throughout their sentences, words such as quoi, où, qui, quand, pourquoi, and comment. These common words are very similar to the English words what, where, who, when, why and how, and they will pop up often in everyday conversations.

To work towards the goal of fluency in French, you should begin with the basics of common words and their correct pronunciations. From there, you can move naturally towards a more complex understanding of the French language. This is why Rosetta Stone’s French program offers an immersive approach that first introduces common words with visual and audio cues. This approach is designed to help you learn in the context of real-world conversations. The brief and bite-sized French language lessons are grouped into units that feature common conversational phrases you’ll need for everyday situations. And the lessons include practical review that help new learners solidify their language skills.

One of the things the French language is most notable for is its je ne sais quoi, which is an indefinable quality that makes the French accent sound alluring and mysterious. But what may seem to be an elusive aspect of the French language’s appeal is really just a nuance of pronunciation. French can be challenging to learn, because it is much more nasal sounding than other languages. Practise will help you become comfortable with this distinct difference. And that’s why it’s important to learn French pronunciation as you learn common words and phrases.

The French alphabet has the same letters as the English alphabet, but some of the letter sounds are pronounced quite differently in French. For example, one of the most familiar sounds in French is the pronunciation of the letter e. In French, e is pronounced ‘euh' and can be heard in many French conversations. That’s because it’s used in the same way English speakers use the sound “uh.” In French, e is used as a pause or as a connector to another thought. 

Unlike English, the French language includes helpful accent marks to guide your pronunciation. There are five different French accent marks to learn: the cédille (Ç), the aigu (é), the circonflexe (â, ê, î, ô, û), the grave (à, è, ù), and the tréma (ë, ï, ü). These accent marks most often indicate that the pronunciation of the letter is irregular. That said, the circonflexe is used only in French writing and doesn’t affect the pronunciation of the words in which it appears.

Learning proper French pronunciation depends on getting immediate feedback so you can make corrections. Rosetta Stone includes our proven and patented speech-recognition engine, TruAccent, into every lesson. It provides real-time feedback of spoken words with pronunciation and cadence scoring. TruAccent was developed by scanning, analyzing, and integrating the speech of native and non-native French speakers. That’s why TruAccent can be a valuable tool in helping you learn to understand and speak in French.

After beginning learners have acquired the French basics that make up the building blocks of speaking French, they can move on to learning the longer phrases that make up the backbone of everyday conversations. Rosetta Stone’s brief and bite-sized, 10-minute lessons are built to help you do just that. The language lessons will guide you towards speaking French with comfort and confidence.

Try Our Award-Winning App

Surround yourself with French whenever, wherever with the Rosetta Stone app.

Download a unit and knock it out on the train or a flight. Select a 5-10 minute lesson and sneak it in while you wait in line or for your ride to show up. And explore dynamic features, like Seek and Speak, where you can point at an object in the real world and get a translation.

The best part? You don’t have to choose between app or desktop. Both come with your subscription and sync, so you can switch between devices seamlessly.

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