How to Use This Guide

For anyone learning a foreign language, nothing is more important than choosing the right learning resources.  However, as with most languages, the amount of available material for learning Russian is overwhelming, and the quality varies enormously.

So what should you buy?

Most resource guides on the internet simply throw together a vast list of virtually everything related to the language in question, leaving you just as bewildered as you were before.

We know from years of experience that the Pareto principle strongly applies to language learning: you really do get 80% of the results from 20% of the materials you buy.  If we had only known at the time how to separate the textbook-wheat from the chaff, we would have saved a considerable amount of money!

And so we have come up with the solution: an all encompassing, fully-updated handbook, advising you on the best books, videos, websites, podcasts and courses to help you on your path to native-level fluency.

We appreciate that you may not have time to read through the whole of the guide, or may just be looking to improve a particular skills.  So, in order to help you find exactly what you need with ease, we’ve grouped our recommended material into the following colour-coordinated categories:

Of course, the material that you use will vastly depend on your current French level.  (After all, there's nothing more dispiriting than working through a course that's too easy or too difficult for you!)  That’s why we have divided the guide into three sections: beginners, intermediate, and advanced – showing you exactly what you need for the stage you’re currently at.

Grammar and vocabulary are the skeleton around which your language skills develop - you can't do anything until you've got to grips with the basics.  Obviously it's vital to choose the right material for the job.  So let's dive straight in and look at the best textbook on the market for beginners

Pay no attention to its cheesy cover - the Essential French Grammar is far and away the best introductory French textbook on the market for beginners. Every fresh-faced language newcomer has to wade through a sea of trumped-up phrasebooks, masquerading as 'complete courses'. This insanely cheap little gem, however, is the real deal and will give you a solid beginner’s foundation in the language.

Don't expect any cheer or colour though: the style is no-nonsense and could put some people off who need to be eased into a new language. Try to look past this: all of the grammatical points are explained extremely well, with plenty of examples and supplementary exercises. The glossary and grammar tables at the back of the book come in useful if you ever forget any material that you've already covered.

Obviously by the time you have worked your way through it, there will still be considerable gaps in your knowledge, so you should then turn to the next item on our list.

Of course, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t supplement Essential French Grammar with other grammar guides. There are plenty of excellent free websites on the internet that go over all the grammar that a beginner needs to learn.

• As it’s name suggests, FrenchbyFrench is a free website created and maintained by a group of French teachers.  It’s a nice collection of well-structured lessons that cover all of the main grammar and vocabulary points that you would expect to find in a beginner’s textbook.

• You can see as soon how much information is featured on Tex’s French Grammar just from the enormous list of topics on its homepage.  Hundreds of examples (and illustrations) for each grammatical point make this an invaluable resource even for intermediate students.

At this point you will want a book to put flesh on the bones and take your French grammar to the next level.  We recommend Schaum’s Outline of French Grammar.

The book is primarily marketed as a workbook with an ‘easy-to-follow review of French grammar’.  This is perhaps doing the comprehensiveness of its grammar coverage a disservice as it goes considerably beyond the topics covered in Essential French Grammar.

With 550 exercises and 90 minutes of downloadable audio files you can be sure that you will get your money’s worth.

What we particularly like about the exercises is that many of them are multiple choice / fill in the blank format.  We feel that these are ideal for beginner students – you don’t want to get bogged down in full-translation exercises at this point, as this will require tedious back-and-forthing with a dictionary.

The French verb is undoubtedly one of the more challenging aspects of the language – you need to get your head round it as soon as possible.

This is easier said than done.  With a confusing array of conjugation patterns, a difficult subjunctive, and countless irregulars, French verbs present a serious challenge to new learners.

Thankfully, you have at your disposal the Big Blue Book of French Verbs. It explains how each verb’s conjugation follows one of three approximate paradigms, and shows that once you have memorised these patterns, the process of learning how to use individual verbs becomes infinitely easier.

It then delivers on its promise and sets out the full conjugations of 555 common verbs, as well as listing the infinitives to 2,300 other ones in the back of the back (with their pattern number next to them).

There is a very useful online alternative to the Big Blue Book: Cooljugator allows you to simply type an English verb into its search bar, and you get the French translation in all of its conjugated forms.

It’s not as comprehensive as a dictionary or the Big Blue Book, so you shouldn’t completely rely on it. But it does have some nice features that make up for this downside: stress indicators, pronunciation hints, related verb lists, etc.

The site’s owner claims that he frequently adds new words to the database so this should become an even more powerful tool in time.

Dictionaries are expensive, so you don’t want to keep buying new ones on a regular basis. For this reason, it makes sense to get the best one available straight away.

With half a million words and phrases, you’ll almost certainly find a translation for whatever it is you need.  One of the best features of the Oxford series (that is often lacking in rival dictionaries) is the care they take to provide translations for words in all of their contexts, including idioms, sayings, and figurative usage. Look up a simple word, like ‘hand’, for instance, and you’ll see what we mean: it can be used in dozens of different ways, and doesn’t just refer to the human appendage.

Dictionaries are often criticised for not keeping up to date with modern technology and innovation. The Oxford series, however, are frequently updated, meaning that if you get the most recent edition you can be sure that it will stay relevant for a good few years.

When you consider that the average native speaker knows about 20-35,000 words, it’s clear that this book will do wonders for your French if you have the stamina to get to the end.

The dictionary allows you to follow a systematic programme of vocabulary learning – master the most common words and then move on to the rarer ones.

Minimum Vocabulary Required for Each CEFR Level

One negative, however, is that it only gives limited definitions. You will probably want to cross-check with another dictionary to make sure you know what each word means across different contexts.

Everyone learns vocabulary in their own way – some people simply suck words in like a sponge and don’t need to make any active effort; for others, nothing seems to stick unless they learn it off by heart.

If you’re the former – great! If not, Anki will prove invaluable.

Essentially, Anki is a flashcard app. But what differentiates it from the hundreds of competitors is the spaced repetition algorithm that it uses. This means that it is able to remember which words you find more difficult to recall than others and to test you on them more frequently.   

While some of the settings can be a little fiddly, and synchronisation between phones and computers can play up, it is generally an extremely reliable app and one that we wished we had used from day one of our language learning.

Even if you only use Anki for half an hour each day, you’ll see marked improvements in your vocabulary. 

The good thing about Anki is that sometimes you don’t even have to compile vocabulary decks yourself. If you search around on the internet, you can sometimes find pre-made decks that you can import into your folders.

One such deck, created by Neri, displays 5,000 French sentences sorted from easiest to hardest. It’s a great way to gradually build up set-phrases and connecting words. You can download the deck from here.

Choosing reading material is not easy when you’ve just started learning a foreign language. The vast majority of books and newspapers available to you will be too challenging at this point, and yet, equally, you can’t stay tethered to the artificially simplistic exercises in your textbooks for too long.

So where is the best place to start once you’re ready to venture out into the world of literature?

Many language guides come out with the same suggestion: start with children’s books. This is TERRIBLE advice. There is nothing easy about children’s literature – especially for learners of French! Although the concepts and storylines are simplistic enough to be enjoyed by toddlers, you face a number of surprisingly tricky linguistic challenges, such as a confusing array of diminutives, strange vocabulary, and irregular sentence structure.

A far better option would be to start off with something aimed at older children/teenagers. The vocabulary in these books is still pretty simple, but the grammar is often more regular than those aimed at younger readers.

If you’ve worked through about half of Schaum's Outline, you should find it relatively easy to read one of the Tintin books.

As well as being great stories in themselves, the comic book format means that you’re reading succinct speech bubbles, rather than long sentences. This makes for good, easy practice texts while you’re still mastering trickier grammatical elements, like participles and relative clauses.

When you’ve finished the textbook the best thing to do is to read some French texts with parallel translations. Having to go back and forth between the book you’re reading and a dictionary can be incredibly frustrating, and often saps a lot of the fun out of reading.

This is the solution: collections of classic short stories from the twentieth century with English translations on the opposite page.

Surprisingly, that’s pretty much the only volume of French parallel texts out there.  If you want some more reading practice, we highly recommend Olly Richard’s Short Stories for Beginners.  It’s an excellent collection of unusual stories that would be perfect for any upper-beginner learner.

It’s vital that you practise your writing as much as possible when you’ve just started learning a language. Reading and learning vocabulary is important but you won’t be able to cement all of this new information in your brain without putting pen to paper. Fortunately, there are many excellent French course books on the market. Here are the best ones:

If you want something a little lighter than French Review and Practice, then look no further: Easy French Exercises is an excellent little self-study workbook.

Packed full of fun puzzles, games, and written exercises, it will come in useful if you’re looking for a language refresher rather than serious drilling.  It’s a good way to ease yourself into some of the harder workbooks we recommend in this guide.

Get speaking as soon as you can! It’s the hardest (and most important) language skill, but the one that we most often neglect.

Although you could get a private tutor straight off the bat, it may be cheaper and more constructive to enrol on an evening course in your city.

The hourly prices of these courses are often twice as cheap as those that a native speaker will charge for one-to-one tuition in your city. On the other hand, a large class will limit the amount of time you get to speak, and sitting patiently while the inevitable class laggard struggles through material that you mastered weeks ago can be incredibly irritating.

But if you can find a course with a small-number of other highly motivated participants, your speaking will make incredible progress.

Well-reviewed French courses in selected cities include:

French stands out among the Romance languages for being notoriously difficult to pronounce correctly.  While it is certainly not as difficult as languages like Mandarin Arabic, you will struggle to pass yourself off as a native without some serious effort.

An Introduction to French Pronunciation attempts to lighten the load and provides an excellent guide to current French pronunciation.

While this academic approach may not suit all learners, for others the clear and detailed chapters on word elements, rhythmic groups, and intonation may be just what they need to reduce their foreign accents.

Whatever your style, the sections on regional variations will prove to be invaluable for all students.

Good news! The rise of computer technology and the internet means that there is now an enormous amount of listening opportunities out there for you to take advantage of.

Here we narrow down the best courses, channels, and podcasts for beginners to take their listening skills to the next level

In compiling this guide we trialled over a dozen of the top online French courses.  Rocket French stood out as easily the best of the bunch – here’s why:

We are naturally suspicious of online language courses, as the vast majority do not deliver on their promises – FrenchPod101 is one of the few exceptions.

For a very reasonable price you gain access to a veritable treasure trove of French learning tools and resources, including:

Although the lessons are probably a bit on the easy side for advanced learners, for beginners this is an absolute must-have resource.  The sheer quantity of audio and video lessons alone makes it far and away the most efficient way to improve your French listening skills.

FrenchPod101 has been expanding steadily for the last few years thanks to its dedicated team.  As it is continuously adding new content to the site you can be sure that you will always have fresh material to practice with.

Although French only uses a few extra letters than English, it’s still a good idea to get some keyboard stickers while you get used to their placement.

You can find a range of transparent French stickers that sit neatly on your keyboard without obscuring the original English symbols next to them.

Beginners | Intermediate | Advanced