The liaison trap
A free French liaison listening quiz for B2 learners, with real audio you can replay. Liaison and elision blur word borders: ils ont or ils sont, un or the start of the next word. Scored on the page.
Did you hear the z?
French glues words together: ils ont and ils sont, un œuf and un neuf, ouvert and tout vert. Eleven recordings, and each time only one transcription survives the grammar.
Step 1 / 3
The French liaison listening quiz for trained ears
Liaison is where good learners get humbled. Ils ont and ils sont differ by one consonant, /z/ versus /s/, delivered in a fraction of a second: hear it wrong and they have becomes they are. Elision and enchaînement pile on: c’est un ami arrives as sè-tun-na-mi, and the word un has dissolved into its neighbours. Reading-first learners suffer most because the written word borders they rely on simply do not exist in the sound stream. This quiz targets exactly those seams.
Treat each clip as forensic work: replay it, isolate the consonant at the border, then commit to an answer. The answer key afterwards lets you re-listen with the text visible, so you can hear the /z/ of ils ont now that you know it is there. To keep the training going at full sentence length, The French Briefing articles provide sentence-by-sentence audio where every natural liaison is in place.
How do I hear the difference between ils ont and ils sont?
One consonant: ils ont has a voiced /z/ liaison (il-z-ont), ils sont an unvoiced /s/. Your cue is vibration: /z/ buzzes, /s/ hisses. English has both sounds, so this is not a new phoneme, just a new place to listen: the word border.
Are liaisons always pronounced in spoken French?
No, and that is part of the trap. Some are obligatory (les amis, ils ont), some forbidden (after et), many optional and tied to register: a newsreader makes liaisons a friend at the bar skips. B2 listening means handling both versions of the same sentence.
Why do French words seem to have no boundaries?
Because phonetically they often do not. French resyllabifies across word borders: a final consonant attaches to the next vowel, so petite amie is heard as pe-ti-ta-mie. The unit of spoken French is the breath group, not the word. Your ear must learn to segment by grammar, not by silence.
