Free French Learning Resources for Adults and Kids

free French learning resources
As promised, here are the FREE French learning resources I’ve gathered to complement our lessons. As I said, most (not all) of these are not intended for young elementary kids, but they are either very well organized, thorough or complete with audio and/or video, so it was worth including them here, even if only to use as reference.

Being the research junkie that I am, I combed the Internet looking for the perfect resource. I’ve come across dozens and dozens of language learning sites, and dozens of dozens of lists or directories of language learning sites. There is an endless number of free resources in the Internet, but I decided to include here only what I considered the best of what I saw. Naturally, this is just my personal opinion.  And of course, the precursor to this list, my first post on Learning French and Chinese at the Same Time  includes our favorites resources which we are currently using.

Lastly, this list contains only free resources. there are a lot of paid services that I’m tempted to try as they seem very good, but perhaps that will be a topic for another post.

 

Free French Courses

  1. Francais Interacif – A complete French course developed by the University of Texas
  2. My French Language Course on Wikimedia Commons – A complete introductory French course in PDF, 222 pages.
  3. FSI Language Courses – Courses developed by the U.S. government that are in the public domain. Learn 20+ languages with audio courses.
  4. LanguageGuide.org/french/ – This site is still a work in progress. I love how they integrated the sound into the lessons, very handy!
  5. Le Point de FLE – Extensive grammar, and vocabulary lessons with audio.
  6. My Languages – What I liked about this site is that you don’t have to do a lot of clicking to hear the audio, just mouse over the image and listen. Handy to go over a lot of words fairly quickly.
  7. Polar FLE – Learn French with Inspector Roger Duflair: A story about a murder case which Inspector Duflair must solve. Can’t wait to try it, looks fun!
  8. Ortholud – Apprendre le francais en s’amusant.  Site entirely on French with lessons on conjugations, grammar, spelling, and readings.

Audio Courses

  1. CoffeeBreak French – An iTunes podcast course from beginners to advanced.  It’s free to listen to the audio, but the PDF transcript must be purchased if desired, which completes the lesson, I think. They do have several plans available: Complete season transcripts at their website or 5 lessons/episodes at a time for kindle at Amazon.  Excellent quality and nice dialogue type lessons!

 

Readings

  1. The Ashcombe School – Free French video readings with built-in quizzes.
  2. The French Experiment – Already listed above, but wanted to include it here again for its children’s stories with audio and translations… wish they had more!
  3. Book Box – Free read alouds for children. Watch the videos with French subtitles in youtube and download the PDF in English from their website.  Paid stories also available.

 

Community Learning

  1. Busuu – Join and learn for free.
  2. LiveMocha – Same as above, they also offer paid courses.
  3. Lang-8 – Learn from native speakers.
  4. RhinoSpike – An online language learning community tool that lets users around the globe connect and exchange foreign language audio files. Get any foreign language text read aloud for you by a native speaker!
  5. Forvo – listen to the correct pronunciation.

 

Online Magazine

  1. Bonjour de France – Free magazine with articles, exercises, tests, and activities.

 

Supplemental Materials

  1. Conjuguemos – An interactive verb conjugation and grammar tool for your French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German or Latin.
  2. The French Tutorial – Very well organized basics tutorial of French grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
  3. Verbix – Conjugate verbs in hundreds of languages.
  4. The French Experiment – Free French lessons, stories, reviews, and cats.
  5. Internet Polyglot.com – Free French vocabulary games. as well as  20+ other languages.
  6. MFL Sunderland French Resources – These include a big collection of lesson plans, vocabulary sheets and activities for elementary children. Make sure to check out the podcasts (aside from the audio files) with their corresponding PDF transcripts.
  7. LanguageResources.co.uk – Just like Sunderland above, this is a big collection of lesson plans, etc. for school kids.

 

Games

  1. Ciel Brittany – Printable games for the whole family. Yay!
  2. French-games.net – free games for beginners and intermediate learners of French, kids and adults.

 

 

If You Speak Spanish

If you speak Spanish, these websites from Spain offer excellent free French lessons and/or readings with audio and transcriptions in both, Spanish and French:

  1. AulaFacil.com – Cursos de francés básico, intermedio y avanzado, lecturas y ejercicios para adultos y niños con audios y/o videos.
  2. Mail x Mail – Curso introductorio de francés, se puede descargar el curso en PDF si se desea.

 

All right, so these are my second tier of top picks. Our favorites appear in the precursor post to this one: Learning French and Chinese at the Same Time, as I mentioned.  I’m sure I’ll find more great options as soon as I click publish on this post 😉  No worries, if that happens, I’ll just keep adding to the list.

J’espère que cela est utile pour vous. Merci beaucoup!  🙂

 

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