How to Learn French: A Complete Roadmap

There is no single best way to learn French - there is a best way at each stage, and the mistake almost everyone makes is running the beginner method long after it stopped paying. French is one of the fastest languages an English speaker can learn, at 600 to 750 class hours in the Foreign Service Institute’s easiest tier, but only if the method changes as the bottleneck moves.

This is the roadmap: what to do at each CEFR level from A1 to B2, how to split time across the four skills, and which popular study habits produce the feeling of progress without the progress.

Where should you actually start?

With sound, before vocabulary. This is the one piece of sequencing that most beginner courses get wrong, and it is expensive to fix later.

French spelling and French pronunciation are far apart. Qu’est-ce qu’il y a ? - What is it? - is five written words and roughly two syllables when spoken. Je ne sais pas - I don’t know - is commonly closer to chais pas. If you build your first thousand words from the page, you will not recognise them when a French person says them, and you will have to learn each one a second time.

Spend the first two weeks on:

• Nasal vowels - un bon vin blanc contains four of them, and English has none.
• The u / ou contrast - tu versus tout. Different words, and English speakers merge them by default.
• Silent final consonants - petit, grand, vous parlez.
• Liaison and elision - les amis links, je ai is impossible and becomes j’ai.

Then start vocabulary, and store every noun with its article: une maison, not maison. Learning it attached costs nothing now and is a serious retrofit at B1. The endings do help more than most courses admit - measured across 24,689 nouns, several suffixes are 100% reliable - but the exceptions cluster in exactly the words you learn first, so the habit is what saves you.

What should you do at A1?

A1 is the mechanical layer and it is the largest single block of grammar on the scale. The goal is coverage, not elegance.

Grammar to own: the present tense of être, avoir, aller, faire, then regular -er verbs, then the modals pouvoir, vouloir, devoir, savoir. Then articles, adjective agreement, questions, negation and the partitive - du pain, de la viande - which has no English equivalent and appears constantly.

Vocabulary target: roughly 800 to 1,000 words. This is the highest-return vocabulary you will ever learn, because frequency is brutally top-heavy: measured on a French corpus, the first thousand words cover 88.4% of spoken French, and the second thousand add only 4.6 points.

What to use: this is the one stage where apps and structured courses are genuinely efficient. Drilling is the right activity when the material is finite and mechanical - and it is also, on the published evidence, about as far as an app takes you.

What not to do yet: native films, novels, and news. At A1 they are noise, and the hours feel like study while teaching almost nothing. The full grammar sequence, level by level, is set out in French grammar by CEFR level, and what sits inside A1 specifically is on the A1 curriculum page.

What changes at A2?

A2 is where French becomes a language rather than a phrasebook, and it is where the method has to change for the first time.

The past tenses arrive. Passé composé with avoir, then with être - which brings agreement - then the imparfait, then the contrast between them:

• Je lisais quand le téléphone a sonné. - I was reading when the phone rang.

Imparfait is the background, passé composé is the event. English gives you no cue, which is why this is the error that survives longest, all the way into C1 writing - the test that actually decides it is worth reading once at this stage.

Input starts here. A2 is the first point at which reading in volume works, because there is finally enough grammar to follow a story. This is the stage to move from drilling to graded material - text you understand at around 98%, roughly one unknown word every two lines. The reasoning behind that number is in how to learn French by reading, and the series that are actually labelled by CEFR level are listed in French graded readers by level.

The plateau also starts here. Almost everyone stalls in the gap between surviving a conversation and holding one - and if the first months felt disproportionately brutal, that was not your imagination: A1 is the densest grammar block on the entire scale. It is not a wall, it is an illusion caused by frequency: your first thousand words covered most of what you heard, the second thousand covers much less, so the same rate of learning feels like a stop.

How do you get from B1 to B2?

By volume first and precision second - and B1 to B2 is the longest single step on the CEFR scale, usually quoted at around 200 guided hours against roughly 100 for A1 to A2. It is also the least intuitive, because B2 contains fewer grammar points than B1 and is still harder.

At B1 you can make yourself understood, and that is exactly the trap. The B1 criterion is getting the message across; the B2 criterion is choosing the right form. You can talk fluently for years while avoiding every structure you find uncomfortable - using je pense que to dodge the subjunctive, using the present to dodge tense agreement - and get faster without getting better.

Three things move it:

Volume of input slightly above your level. Not comfortable material, and not material you have to decode. Novels, podcasts, series without English subtitles.

Deliberate work on what you avoid. Write a paragraph that forces the structure: a regret needs the conditional past, a concession needs bien que and the subjunctive - the structure most B1 speakers have quietly built a whole vocabulary around avoiding.

Correction. This is the one thing that does not happen on its own, and the only part of the journey where paying for a teacher is clearly efficient. An hour a week of marked production is worth more at this stage than ten hours of listening. The reason is measurable: 68.6% of French written forms sound identical to another form of the same word, so most agreement errors produce no audible signal for you to catch.

If your target is administrative rather than personal, B2 is now the French naturalisation threshold and B1 the resident-card threshold - the 2026 rules are in the guide to French levels for citizenship.

How should you split your time between the four skills?

Not evenly, and not the same way at every level.

The pattern: input dominates early and middle, output dominates late. Reversing it - heavy speaking practice at A1, heavy passive listening at B2 - is a common and expensive mistake.

What does not work?

Four habits that feel like studying.

Watching French series with English subtitles. You are reading English while French plays. Use French subtitles, or none.

Re-reading grammar explanations you already understand. Comprehension was never the missing part; retrieval is. If you can explain the rule and still get it wrong in speech, more explanation will not help.

Flashcards as the main activity. Cards are good at holding on to words you have already met in context and bad at teaching them in the first place. A card tells you rendre means “to give back”; it does not tell you about rendre service, rendre visite or se rendre compte.

Streaks as a proxy for hours. A daily five-minute lesson is a habit, not a study plan. Six hundred hours at five minutes a day is nineteen years. The arithmetic for realistic paces is in how long it takes to learn French, and what a long streak actually converts into is in what level Duolingo French gets you to.

How do you know which level you are actually at?

Test it against material, not against a feeling. Take a text at the level you believe you are, read one page, and count how many times you stop. More than twice and you are a level above yourself.

For a formal answer, the CEFR descriptors are the reference, and a DELF or TCF result is the version that counts administratively - which of the two you should sit depends on whether you need a permanent diploma or a fast measurement. For a practical answer, the level you should study at is the one where you understand most of what you meet and still meet something new on every page.

That is the whole design behind Gallus: the A1 to C1 curriculum is broken into 61 levels with 424 grammar points, and each one is taught through graded stories that use it - so the material moves up with you instead of you guessing where to jump.

Pick the next level, not the finish line. The syllabus for each one is published unit by unit on the CEFR levels hub.