LingoDrop
French · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "qui" in French?
kee — a bare "k" and a pure "ee". Like English "key", with no "w" anywhere.
One syllable. As a question word it opens the sentence with a slight lift, and as a relative pronoun it sits unstressed inside a clause: la femme qui PARLE.
Listen: qui
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
Qui est cette femme ?
Who is that woman?
Listen: Qui est cette femme ?
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
"Qui est cette femme ?" carries an optional liaison between "qui" and "est", though since "qui" ends in a vowel there is nothing to link — the two simply run together as /ki.ɛ/. "Cette" is the feminine demonstrative with an audible "t", and "femme" is a spelling oddity: it is pronounced /fam/, with the "e" sounding like an "a".
Where English speakers slip
The "w" is the reflex error — "kwee" instead of "kee". French "qu" is always a bare "k". Learners also confuse "qui" and "que" grammatically: "qui" is the subject (who does something) and "que" is the object (whom something is done to). Getting them backwards is a much more visible error than any vowel.