Ma journée commence tôt avec un café et un peu de musique.

In French, possessive adjectives agree with the gender of the noun, not with the person who owns it.

• journée is a feminine noun → la journée

• For a feminine singular noun with “my,” you use ma.

  So:

• ma journée = my day
  If it were a masculine noun (e.g. mon café), you’d use mon instead.

Both relate to “day,” but they’re used differently:

• jour = the day as a unit of time, neutral/abstract
  
  • e.g. trois jours = three days
• journée = the course of the day / how the day goes, often with a sense of duration or experience
  
  • e.g. Bonne journée ! = Have a nice day!

In Ma journée commence tôt, the speaker is talking about how their whole day unfolds/feels, so journée is more natural than jour.

journée is pronounced roughly /ʒur.ne/:

• j → like the s in measure or vision
• ou → like oo in food
• r → French guttural r in the throat
• née → like nay

Syllables: jour-née, with the stress naturally falling on the last syllable in French: journÉE.

The verb is commencer (“to begin, to start”) and here it’s used intransitively with a subject:

• Ma journée commence… = My day starts…

You don’t need a reflexive form (se commencer) here. Se commencer exists but is rare and sounds literary or technical; everyday French just uses commencer:

• Le film commence à 20 h. = The film starts at 8 p.m.
• Ma journée commence tôt. = My day starts early.

It’s the present tense, 3rd person singular of commencer:

• je commence
• tu commences
• il/elle/on commence
• nous commençons
• vous commencez
• ils/elles commencent

The subject is ma journée (3rd person singular, like elle), so you use commence.

tôt means “early” (in time).

In French, adverbs like tôt often come right after the verb they modify:

• Ma journée commence tôt. = My day starts early.

You could technically move it, but other positions would sound odd or marked here. For example:

• Ma journée commence tôt avec un café… (normal)
• Ma journée commence avec un café… tôt. (sounds like “later I’m adding that it’s early,” a bit unnatural)

So the usual, neutral position is after the verb: commence tôt.

tôt is pronounced roughly /to/ (like toe in English):

• t as in top
• ô is like a closed o sound, a bit like the o in go (but without adding a w sound)
• The final t is silent.

The little hat is a circumflex accent. In tôt, it mainly:

• marks the vowel quality (closed o), and
• historically often shows that an s used to follow (e.g. tost → tôt), but that’s just etymological now.

It doesn’t change the basic meaning; it just affects spelling and pronunciation.

Both avec and par can appear after commencer, but they don’t feel the same:

• commencer avec = to start with something, in the sense of accompanied by

  • Ma journée commence tôt avec un café…
    → My day starts early, and I have a coffee as part of that start.

• commencer par = to begin by doing something, often the first step in a sequence

  • Je commence ma journée par un café.
    → I start my day by having a coffee (that’s the first action).

In the given sentence, avec suggests that coffee and music are elements present at the beginning of the day, rather than focusing on the sequence of actions.

Both are possible, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing:

• un café = a coffee, usually understood as one cup of coffee (countable)

  • Je prends un café. = I’ll have a coffee.

• du café = some coffee, an unspecified quantity (mass noun)

  • Je bois du café. = I drink coffee / I’m drinking some coffee.

In avec un café, the idea is typically “with a (cup of) coffee”, something concrete you’re having at the start of your day.
You could say avec du café, but that focuses more on the substance in general rather than one coffee you drink.

After expressions of quantity, French normally uses de without an article:

• un peu de
  • noun
• beaucoup de
  • noun
• trop de
  • noun

So:

• un peu de musique = a little music
• beaucoup de travail = a lot of work

un peu de la musique is possible but means something more specific like “a little (bit of the) music”, referring to a previously identified kind/portion of music.
In your sentence, we’re talking about music in general, so the correct and natural form is un peu de musique.

In un peu de musique, the pattern is:

• un peu de
  • bare noun (no article)

That’s simply the rule after this quantity phrase. It doesn’t mean musique never takes an article:

• J’écoute de la musique. = I listen to music.
• La musique est trop forte. = The music is too loud.

But with un peu de, you drop the article and say:

• un peu de musique
• un peu de sucre (a bit of sugar)
• un peu de temps (a bit of time)

Yes, Ma journée commence tôt par un café et un peu de musique is grammatically correct, but the nuance changes slightly:

• commence par focuses on the first action in a sequence → “My day begins by a coffee and a bit of music.”
• commence avec is more like “starts (and it includes) a coffee and a bit of music”, less about sequence and more about what accompanies the start.

Both are understandable; avec sounds a bit more casual and descriptive of what you have when the day starts.

• matinée = the morning period (roughly from when you wake up until around midday)
• journée = the whole day (wake-up to bedtime), as an experience

So:

• Ma matinée commence tôt… = My morning starts early…
• Ma journée commence tôt… = My (whole) day starts early…

Both can be correct, depending on what you want to say. If you mean that your whole day starts early (not just the morning part), journée is the better choice.