Liaison is when French connects words by pronouncing normally-silent final consonants. "Les amis" becomes "lay-ZA-mee." Get it wrong and you sound ungrammatical. Get it right and you sound native.
Liaison is one of the most visibly-French things in the language, and one of the hardest to get right. There are required liaisons (les amis), forbidden liaisons (les haricots), and optional ones (after a verb, depending on style). Get the forbidden ones wrong and you commit a grammar error.
The non-obvious rule: casual speech has more liaisons than formal. Wait — opposite to English intuition. Formal French "drops" liaisons; casual French "uses" them as a fluency signal.
The specific liaison rule for your context. Required, forbidden, or optional.
Common word pairs where the rule applies.
The reality vs. the textbook. Casual speech differs.
French for "linking" — the words link by pronouncing normally-silent consonants. It's a fluency device; without it, French sounds choppy.
Yes — until you can hear when not to. Making required liaisons = native-like. Forgetting forbidden ones = grammar error. Better to do too many than too few.
Some liaisons change pronunciation: "mon ami" is "moh-NA-mee" (n creates nasal before vowel). The liaison itself triggers the nasal effect.