How to learn
French vocabulary

The short answer

• Save the noun with un or une, le or la: never with l’ alone, which hides the gender (l’arbre is un arbre).
• Keep the sound with the spelling: listen to every new word, and keep its pronunciation on the card, because many letters are silent.
• Review on a schedule: a few words a day, seen again after 1, 3, 7 and 21 days, beat long lists read once.

What makes French words easy, and hard

Five things decide how a French word should go into your notebook.

Gender, and the apostrophe that hides it

Every noun is masculine or feminine, and the article, adjectives and past participles follow it. Some endings help: nouns in -tion⁠, -sion and -té are mostly feminine (la nation⁠, la liberté), nouns in -ment and -age mostly masculine (le moment⁠, le fromage). The exceptions are everyday words: la page⁠, la plage⁠, l’image (f.) and l’été (m.).

Before a vowel or a silent h, le and la both become l’⁠, and the plural les never shows gender. So l’arbre (m.) and l’affiche (f.) look the same. Save such nouns with un or une⁠, which never drop a letter: un arbre⁠, une affiche⁠. A few nouns even change meaning with their gender: le livre is a book and la livre a pound; le tour a tour and la tour a tower; le poste a job and la poste the post office.

Silent letters, liaison and the h that is not silent

French writes many letters it does not say, most often at the end of a word: petit⁠, beaucoup⁠, ils parlent⁠. In liaison, a silent final consonant is said when the next word starts with a vowel: les amis is said with a z sound, /le.z‿a.mi/. One trap catches every learner: most words starting with h behave as if they began with a vowel (l’homme⁠, les hommes with liaison), but some have an aspirated h, which takes no apostrophe and no liaison: le héros⁠, la honte⁠, les haricots⁠. You cannot see which from the spelling, so note it on the card.

Accents are part of the spelling

French uses é⁠, è⁠, ê⁠, à⁠, ù⁠, ç and others, and some separate two words: ou (or) and où (where), a (has) and à (to), sur (on) and sûr (sure), du and dû⁠. The spelling reform of 1990 made the circumflex on i and u optional, except in verb endings and where it tells two words apart, so paraître and paraitre are both correct (Académie française, “Les rectifications de l’orthographe”, 1990). Pick the spelling your course or books use, and keep to it.

Cognates and false friends

Thousands of words are shared with English: la nation⁠, la possibilité⁠, important⁠. They are cheap to learn; spend your reviews on the look-alikes that mean something else. Actuellement means currently, not actually; éventuellement means possibly; a librairie is a bookshop (a library is a bibliothèque); sensible means sensitive; blesser means to wound; and assister à means to attend (CNRTL, Trésor de la langue française informatisé). Give each its own card, with the English meaning you expected in the usage note, so the right one wins when the card comes back.

Verbs come with their little words

Save the infinitive, and the preposition or pronoun that belongs to it: penser à (to think about), avoir besoin de (to need), se souvenir de (to remember). Many everyday ideas are a verb phrase in French where English has one word or an adjective: avoir faim (to be hungry), faire attention (to be careful). Keep the whole phrase as one entry, and the sentence with the form you met.

What to put on each card

A French card needs an article that shows the gender, and often its sound. Here is the layout, using the fields of a Lexpad card; the same works on paper or in any flashcard app.

Where to find your words

• Graded readers written for learners at your level: a few new words a page, in a story you can follow.
• News in easy French, such as RFI’s daily news bulletin in simpler French: short, spoken slowly, with a transcript.
• Series, films and YouTube with French subtitles, on YouTube and film and series services, so you can see the word whose letters you could not hear. Pause and save the line.
• Your class or textbook: the words your teacher uses again are the ones you will need.

French in Quebec, Belgium, Switzerland or West Africa shares its grammar but has words of its own; in Quebec, for example, to go shopping is often magasiner⁠. Save the word of the place you hear most, and note the other when you meet it. To pick words from a French text, paste it into the free text to flashcards tool and tap the ones you don’t know.

From videos and subtitles

French subtitles are where the silent letters show up: you hear /bo.ku/ and read beaucoup⁠. Turn them on in French and keep a few words from each video, with their line.

• A click takes the apostrophe with it. In a subtitle the Lexpad extension treats l’arbre or qu’il as one word, so a click saves it whole. Change it to un arbre in your notebook, so the gender is on the card, and keep the line.
• Drag across the article and the noun, or a whole phrase such as avoir besoin de (up to four words), instead of clicking one word.
• Listen for what the subtitle smooths out. Spoken French drops sounds that subtitles often write in full, such as the ne of a negative. Save the written form, and use the line to hear the spoken one.

The routine step by step, with which words to keep: Learn vocabulary from videos.

How many French words a day

Most learners keep 10 to 15 new words a day going; the reviews they bring are the real cost. Cognates are cheap; genders and false friends cost reviews. Try your own numbers in the spaced repetition calculator, and see roughly how many words each level is estimated to need in CEFR levels for vocabulary. The method itself: How to memorize vocabulary.

How Lexpad helps with French