Some words exist just to tell you, "Your French Pronunciation is not yet perfect."

Certain words are like barometers for our French pronunciation. Here we are, living in France, working here, talking to our co-workers when we suddenly trip over an un-pronounceable word like "énergie" ou "sécurité." Heck, you can't even talk about getting bread without saying "boulangerie", right ?

This is annoying because the fact that you are a foreigner again becomes part of the situation. A moment ago, you were just another neighbor, just another co-worker and now you are "l'étranger" (the foreigner, the American, the Australian, etc.) because you have this word that you can't pronounce. You have to slow down and pronounce it very carefully while the person listening to you politely waits. You are the outsider again. That is fine, but it is annoying, especially if you have been speaking French for years. After all, if you still can't speak like a native, this situation is likely to go on for as long as you live here. You may even retire here and spend your last years still struggling to speak this language. What a pain in the derrière!

Every person who has gotten reasonably fluent in a foreign language has had this problem. You spend most of the day oblivious to your accent. You sound great to you! You have no idea that everyone around you hears a foreign accent whenever you open your mouth to speak. And then you get this glaring reminder that, no, your French is not perfect.

I see this problem differently. These hard words are the canary in the coal mine signaling me to wake up! If there is a word in French I can't pronounce, it is surely because my "mouth position" (for lack of a better term) is still not perfect.

When I trip upon a word, I say to myself, "Cool - a new hard word! I need to experiment with it later and see what I learn about the way my tongue and lips need to move in order to pronounce it with ease." Then I experiment until I can pronounce that word without problems. And once I can do that, I need to use that mouth position for all of the rest of my French.

And then comes the payoff: with what I've just learned thanks to that new hard word, the rest of my French sounds that much better.

I have been making a list of French words that are...
a) extremely hard for English speakers to pronounce
b) give us clues to the way forward in our pronunciation.