9 of the Best Resources for Starting to Learn French Online

Bonjour! French is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world and is still considered more important than English in some European countries. It is one of my most advanced languages, so I'm bringing you over 30 years of French learning experience today!

Whether you dream of wandering the streets of Paris and Montréal, or you want to boost your career in fashion, the following resources will be everything you need to start parler français!

This article contains some affiliate links which are marked with *.

9 Top Resources For Learning French Online

1. Finally Get It in French Grammar

This super friendly course is created for French beginners or "false beginners" - those who studied a while ago and don't feel like they got anywhere.

You will learn how to speak simple, correct, beautiful French together with me (and my kitty). Featuring easy explanations of the all the grammar you’ll need for your first year of French, this course will help you eliminate embarrassing errors with a friendly and informal tutor – yep that's me.

The course comes with offers 2 hours of videos, live discussions and worksheets to ensure you have understood everything correctly.

2. TV5 Monde

TV5 Monde is an international TV channel in French, which offers its own language courses and practice under the ‘Langue Française’ tab. From digital libraries to dictionaries and video classes, this website is perfect for beginners who aren’t quite sure where to begin.

3. Intrepid French: Master French Phrases for Travel FAST

Michele from Intrepid Guide is your go-to guide for language and travel! Her resource is the BEST if you want to pick up the language for travelling to France, Québec or beyond.

I love Michele's course because it comes with so many highly valuable extras like a menu guide and great pronunciation guides. Click here to learn about Mastering French for Travel - FAST*

4. Bite Size French*

Bite Size is the perfect companion for anyone who has learnt a little French and wants to become better at listening and speaking.

The course is packed with beginner-friendly dialogues that you can listen to in just a few minutes a day to become better at French without having to work harder and harder.

4. Bon Patron

If you’ve gotten a tiny bit comfortable with the French language, Bon Patron is the perfect place to practice those writing skills. Bon Patron is a French autocorrect tool; you can practice your writing skills by typing in sentences and have it correct the grammar and spelling errors it can find. The perfect tool to practice those sentences you’ve learned!

5. French Language TV Shows

French TV shows are an excellent way to implement some new vocabulary and to get used to the sound and pronunciation of French. Get the DVD, and you'll also have bilingual subtitles to play with. Try these shows for a start:

Les Revenants* is a supernatural drama which follows the residents of a small French alpine town as they come to terms with a series of mysterious and unbelievable occurrences: a small group of deceased men, women and children suddenly return from the dead and attempt to re-join the family and friends they left behind years before. As if this wasn’t creepy enough, the town also begins experiencing a series of chilling local murders.

Spiral* is the perfect show for you crime lovers out there. When the badly beaten body of a young Romanian woman is discovered on a Parisian rubbish dump, we are suddenly plunged deep into a murky underworld of prostitution, drugs, business, politics and justice. If you like CSI, The Wire and 24, chances are you’re gonna like Spiral.

7. Crack the Grammar Code Course

Ready for communicating in French at a higher level? Let this training be your secret!

This resource is not specific to French, but it will definitely help your English speaker brain untangle the complicated grammar of French! Crack the Grammar Code is a step-by-step guide to efficient language learning, giving you the foundation for fluid French learning without having to memorize grammar all the time.

8. Bescherelle Complete Guide to Conjugating 12,000 French Verbs*

One of the hardest parts of learning a new language can be getting used to all the rules for conjugating verbs – sometimes they don’t make sense to the beginner eye!

This is where the Becherelle Complete Guide comes in; it includes just about every verb you can think of. If it’s not in there, chances are you won’t need to know it! This language course book has been around since the mid 80s, I used it in the mid 90s, and is just as useful today as it was back then.

9. BBC Languages French

BBC has a fab introductory hub for learning French. Some of the content is aimed at children, making it perfect for beginners! They have a test where you can test your skills and determine your level, links to French TV and radio websites. Some of it is a little outdated, but still worth a look for the amount of free resources you can find here.

By measuring your progress, you’ll soon feel so confident about speaking French that you won’t be able to wait to talk to someone.

Recommended French Courses

Finally Get It In French Grammar (for beginners and refreshers)

Bite Size French (focus on sentences, not explanations)

French conversations (for intermediate to advanced learners)

Struggling to get ahead in solo language learning?

Join my free training, the Little-Known Secret to Success in Language Learning.

Grammar ♥︎ Practice en Français: 3 Sweet Grammar Tricks for Learning French

Get out the macaroons for some sweet sweet grammaire française. Yes, I've got a treat for those of you wanting to take grammar ♥︎ to the next level with a dip into the grammar of a language I've learnt for 20 years: French!

In this post, you're going to learn the essentials of the French language, explained in simple terms that will have you creating your own sentences in minutes. It is a collaboration with Shannon from Eurolinguiste, who is covering how to use the past, present and future tenses in French on Monday.

I have selected 2 topics for beginners and 1 bonus for improvers, meaning that you can study French and crack on with this post at any level.

Beginner Step 1: Using French Nouns

Sentences are made up of different components, but only two of them are absolutely essential:

• the verbs, telling you about an action
• the nouns, telling you who is acting and what they're acting with

French nouns come in two gender variations, feminine and masculine. The gender isn't really visible in a word itself, but it has an impact on the kinds of words you have to use around it.

Firstly, make sure you use the right article with your noun. There are definite articles (like the English the) and indefinite articles (like a or an). You have to choose the right one according to the gender, so here it matters if your noun is feminine or masculine.

Quick Guide to French Articles

New French learners find themselves frustrated when they realize that the gender of a noun is impossible to predict. I agree - it's tricky! There are a few good rules, however, that you can use to spot helpful patterns. For example, words ending in -ment are always masculine, words ending in -tion are always feminine, and according to my French teacher in secretary school "all the bad things are masculine" (divorce being her example!).

What If You Get The Gender Wrong?

There is no big penalty for getting the gender of a French noun wrong as you are learning the language. In fact, it happens all the time! Native speakers will not think that you are bad at speaking French because even after decades it's still difficult to assign every gender correctly.

###Easiest "language hack"?

Just ask: ...c'est féminin où masculin, s'il vous plaît?" (is that feminine or masculine, please?).

Beginner Step 2: Using French Adjectives

Adjectives are descriptive words (for example grand meaning big), and you can just pick those out of the dictionary...and then you've got to change them according to the gender of the noun. So in other words, the adjective will always be looking to its big noun brother.

A bit like that kid who hangs out with the stronger kid in the playground and shouts "yeah right!" every time the big kid does some thing. The agreement also covers if the words are in singular and plural

Here is a Quick Reference List of the Rules

• When the adjective usually ends in a consonant, the feminine version will take an extra -e at the end. For example, grand and grande.
• When the adjective ends in -eux, the feminine version will be -euse. For example, heureux and heureuse.
• When it ends in -ien, the feminine version is -ienne, like in ancien and ancienne.
• When the adjective already ends in an -e, it doesn't change. Bonus! For example, jeune stays the same.

Here are a few helpful words that you can use to describe yourself. The French for "I am" is Je suis. Try it!

Quelle est ta nationalité? - Je suis..

• anglais, -e - English
• allemand, -e - German
• américain, -e - American
• canadien, -ne - Canadian
• autrichien, -ne - Austrian

French Grammar for Improvers: Contracted Articles

Shortly after learning the essentials such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, it's time to get into details. French has so many little details that make it sound prettier!

In fact, I have a French textbook from 1948 at home which was owned by my grandfather during the French occupation of Germany. And this book starts with some ground rules of French. Rule number one: Wohlklang, the principle that everything in French has to sound nice. Hah!

Here's what that has to do with French articles. You already know how to say articles from the table above. But here's something you might not realize. Every time the article connects with the words de (of/from) or à (at/to), the two little words try to connect and form a contracted article.

French Contracted Articles in 7 Minutes

Learn the details of how this works in the following video, featuring Kerstin in the summer!

So as you can see, the French grammar really strongly revolves around this idea of sounding nice...well no, actually it's all about your noun being feminine and masculine and this concept determines how the words around it are arranged. Check out Shannon's partner post to learn about the other essential in a French sentence: the verb!

How to Know if You Should Use à or de with a verb

While grammar has many rules that help us avoid memorizing, the case of "how the verb connects to the next word" has to be learnt with a good verb list or table. Those little connecting words are called prepositions, and they cannot be translated directly. When you look up one of the little ones in the dictionary, you're likely to find about 5 meanings.

So for example, "be interested in" is s'intéresser à but "look forward to" is s'attendre à, giving the French word à two different meanings. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I was lucky to have a teacher who put a lot of stress on learning the verbs with their connectors right from the start, so that I never developed a big gap. The verbs that connect directly to the next verb are called "pure infinitive", and the other groups are "infinitive with de" and "infinitive with à". If you're a self-teaching French learner at an early stage, do yourself a favour and study them too.

My go-to reference for everything about French verbs is the Bescherelle L'Art de Conjuguer. In my version (the German one), the relevant lists are in section 164 of the grammar part. Very handy!

Like This Post? Check Out The Full Course

If you loved this blog post, you will undoubtedly enjoy learning French with me in Easy French Grammar for Beginners.

This course contains all the explanations that I wish I had had when I first started out. It's plain and simple, putting things in straightforward terms that just make sense.

Several learners have already written to me with gratitude because the course finally helped them understand complicated concepts.

I'd love for you to try it out, and you can do so right here.

My 5 Simple Steps to French Fluency in 2017

I started learning French over 20 years ago and persisted with it diligently, but for a long time learning French felt like the harder version of learning my other languages, like English and Italian. It’s just that little bit trickier: a little harder to pronounce, a little less seductive.

I never quite connected to that relatively formal French culture, saying Madame and reserving the jokes for a little later. My language level slid down a little from C1…but this year something changed. In 2017...

French came back into my life!

After my first visit to Montréal, I discovered the joys of Quebecois and the relaxed French-Canadian mannerisms that were so on my wavelength. And since moving to Canterbury in South East England, I suddenly started hearing a lot more of the language, bumping into French people, and visiting the French bakeries here.

French is spoken by 80 million people on every continent of the world, and I’m part of a huge community of French learners. In other words, I was able to re-connect to French and focus on how much fun it is to learn a language when we love the places where it’s spoken.

If you also feel a desire to improve your French, either build on old foundations or to start from scratch, check out the following resources to see how I added more French language into my life.

1) Adding French to My Podcast List

My go-to podcast in French is News in Slow French, a short show that takes up no more than 7 or 8 minutes. I also had a root around the French iTunes Store to find more interesting shows.

My usual podcast joys are true crime, languages, politics, and TV reviews so I added Whisperos, a French review show all about Game of Thrones. The great thing about podcasts is that they’ll teach me a bit more colloquial French, my total weakness after years and years of academic and secretarial studies in the language.

Such a small button, such great results

2) Reading in French for 10-15 Minutes a Day

People don’t read anymore? Nonsense! I believe that the text-based nature of the internet means that most people who own a screen read more than ever. My French education had always focused on reading formal language like business letters and Le Monde, so I went out of my way to look for texts with street cred on this one.

Street Cred:

First, I added a subscription to the MademoiZelle feed to my list of blogs. Second, I went out and purchased magazines like Marie-Claire in French. So that was lots of casual, women’s mag style topics, perfect for keeping me interested.

…and Edu Cred

Third, a trip to the library sorted me out with the book 50 Ways to Improve Your French. Sometimes it’s nice to revisit language instruction and focus back on little linguistics points to improve and exercises that go with them. The book is split into different sections so that I only had to pick what was new to me (vocabulary and a review of irregular verbs, job done).

Adding to that, I regularly read articles from French Crazy and French Together to get new words and interesting points into my system.

3) Working through Glossika

I actively sought out educational materials for French learners. I worked on Glossika 123 French to speak more - the majority of sentences were a little below my level, which allowed me to think on my feet and whiz through them.

4) Setting Goals and Making Them Public

As a busy person who is already tackling one main language (Welsh), it was important for me to make sure I actually commit to the time I was going to spend studying the French language.

I’m not someone who learns for over an hour every day, and I do not believe that daily hours of study are necessary for fluency. But having said that, the German saying von nix kommt nix (from nothing comes nothing) is also true. If I was going to get better at French, I had to spend a little more time and effort on it.

So in addition to looking for a few new resources that I was interested in, I also made the decision to be very public about my renewed French efforts. I set up my goals in the Language Habit Toolkit, printed them out and pasted them in my notebook.

A post shared by Kerstin Cable (@kerstin_fluent) on Aug 29, 2017 at 8:58am PDT

The best thing about planning in this way was that I got to eliminate my background worries about how learning French would make it impossible to progress in Welsh, and instead I always had clarity on how much I was going to add in each language.

Posting the photo on Instagram may not be much of a public commitment for some, but for me this was really important. When I tell you guys I’ll do something, it’s just one more reason to keep going.

5) The Easiest Way My French Improved: Speaking to More People!

French is spoken all over the world, so you can look forward to connecting with people in this language anywhere from Canada to Sénégal, from France to Shanghai. Sometimes the French speakers do seem to hide a little bit though, so my trips to Canada and my move to Canterbury really made a difference.

Now, I hear French spoken in the street, at my office, and on the television. But that didn’t solve my conversations issue entirely, so I went one further and found regular text partners. I’ve not started video calling in French yet, but have high hopes for adding in a few conversation classes soon.

If you’re looking for an online tutor or partner, the best online directories to use are italki (for qualified, independent, fair priced live tutors), and HelloTalk (for texting new people).

Keeping My Commitment

Before I started, a small part of me was grappling with the lack of excitement I was feeling. French wasn’t as hot as Welsh somehow, it felt like more of a chore. Adding interesting content and keeping the commitment to “little and often” helped me pull through and improve quickly.

I never aimed to read or listen to French for more than a quarter of an hour every day, but found that this made it a lot easier to get started. If you’re finding it particularly hard to get going, try my “ok then” trick and set a timer for just 10 minutes. It’s a lot better than ignoring French altogether and letting that guilt mount up in your head.

In conclusion, language should never feel like a chore…even if it does require some hard discipline now and then!

How Good is your French?

Are you a French learner, too? Have you been trying to master the language for 20+ years like me, or do you feel like you’re just starting to fly?

I’d love to hear your favourite resources and tips, so go ahead and leave a comment below.

By the way: If you're keen to improve your French grammar, check out Finally Get It in French Grammar, a course I'm teaching in the Fluent online school.