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LEARNING FRENCH

The best smartphone apps for learning French

It's often said the best way to learn French is by speaking it, and that's all well and good - but where do you start if you don't have the words to express yourself?

Published: 23 March 2017 09:57 CET
The best smartphone apps for learning French
Photo by Yura Fresh on Unsplash

A winning way to learn French is while sitting (or more likely, standing) on the Metro, in your lunch break or whenever you have a spare five minutes.

Yes, there are hundreds of apps out there, but we’ve rounded up some of the best (in honour of French language week).

Let us know if you have used them and if they helped you.

Learn French by Bravolol Limited

Perfect for tourists or beginners, this app teaches you 800 of the most common and useful words and phrases. A French-speaking parrot helps you improve your spelling and authentic pronunciation – you can record your voice to see if you’re getting it right, and the words are sorted into topics so you can choose those most relevant to you.

User Janet Perez wrote: “Simple and helpful. It is easy to use it, it teaches you the basic greetings and words, the pronunciation and it doesn’t have annoying commercials.”

6000 Words – Learn French Language for Free

As the name suggests, this app is a vocabulary builder, teaching you the 6,000 most common words in French, so it’s suited to anyone aiming at comprehension (of menus and signs, for example) rather than conversation.

The words are organized in themes with illustrations, phonetic transcriptions and recordings of native pronunciation, and you can test your knowledge using one of the language games. Students can also set the difficulty of the the app according to their level: beginner, intermediate or advanced.

“Great vocabulary builder. Wide selection of vocabulary, also builds spelling skills. Graphics for words are helpful (and funny)” user Amanda McQ commented in the Google Play site.

Le Conjugueur

If you’re already familiar with the basic phrases but want to brush up on your grammar, this handy app is a must. You can look up 9,000 French verbs to find out how to conjugate them in any tense, helping you avoid errors even when you’re dealing with the tricky irregulars or one of the less common tenses.

User Chris Isbister wrote: “Excellent. A solid app for reviewing verb conjugations and definitions, as well as conjugation rules, all without requiring an internet connection.”

Duolingo

One of the most comprehensive and best-rated language-learning apps out there, Duolingo’s makers claim 34 hours on the app “are equivalent to a semester of university-level education”.

Grammar, vocab and phrases are organized into different topics which you work through in small, bite-sized lessons. It evolves as you go so that you’ll be tested on the topics you struggle with most. The only downside is that you can’t pick and choose specific topics to learn, but have to unlock them in the correct order.

“Amazing! Duolingo is really easy and fun and really does a great job of teaching the language you have chosen!! Its cool that you get ‘gems’ when you finish a topic and can spend it in the store to get icons or clothes for the Duolingo bird!” writes user Hannah Bottomley.

And the ones that aren’t free:

FluentU

This one’s a bit different (and only free for the first 15 days). It focuses on video-based learning, meaning that you get to check out real French clips from around the internet and get tested on them afterwards. 

“I really really like the fact that the videos are real authentic videos. It makes it much more interesting. Learning… almost becomes an afterthought to the fact that you are watching cool videos,” one user called Niel said. 

Learn French – Speak French

The app’s creators promise that learning French is “easier than you think”, and its 50 million users worldwide seem to agree, judging by its positive reviews.

It’s aimed at those who want to develop a comprehensive understanding of French, with vocabulary and grammar units, audio dialogues and language games – you can even send exercises to a native speaker for feedback.

“Awesome! I studied French as a subject but I found this app worth a dozen books,” user Waqar Rizvi said in a Play Store critique.

Only the first lesson is free, with subscriptions starting at around €12 for a month. 

Busuu

And lastly, this app, which costs around €10 a month, allows you to interact with real-life French people so you can learn French like real life.

Plenty of speaking practice on hand here, enough that the app promises you can “learn French in only ten minutes per day”.

“Don’t just learn languages, fall in love with them,” says the team, adding that it has 60 million members. 

The app was rated by Apple as one of the “Best Apps” in 2014.

LEARNING FRENCH

Is the English language really just ‘badly pronounced French’?

A French linguist has been making waves with his boldly titled book 'The English language does not exist - it's just badly pronounced French', but does the professor actually have a point?

Published: 23 April 2024 14:35 CEST
Updated: 28 April 2024 14:39 CEST
Is the English language really just 'badly pronounced French'?

The French linguist Bernard Cerquiglini is clear that the title of his book should be taken with humour and a pinch of salt, beginning his work by explaining that it is a ‘bad faith proposition’.

Clearly, the English language does exist and equally clearly the French are a little uneasy about it – with numerous laws, national bodies and local initiatives attempting to fight back against the anglicisms that now litter everyday speech, from ‘c’est cool’ to ‘un job’. 

But Cerquiglini argues that the supposed ‘influx’ of English words that are now used in France, especially tech-related terms, is nothing compared to what happened when French literally invaded English in the Middle Ages.

And the close similarity that the two languages enjoy today – around 30 percent of English words are of French origin – speaks to this entwined history.

“You can also see my book as an homage to the English language, which has been able to adopt so many words… Viking, Danish, French, it’s astonishing,” he told AFP.

The history

The key date in the blending of English and French is the Norman conquest of 1066, when Duke William of Normandy invaded England with a small group of Norman knights and made himself the English king William the Conqueror.

What happened next was a radical re-ordering of society in which English nobles were displaced and William’s knights were installed as a new French-speaking (or at least Norman-speaking) ruling class. 

The use of French by the ruling classes continued into the 13th and 14th centuries, by which time French was the official language of the royal courts, diplomacy, the law, administration and trade – meaning that ambitious English people had no choice but to learn French in order to take part in official or legal processes. 

Cerquiglini says that half of all English’s borrowings from French took place between 1260-1400, with a heavy slant towards words related to nobility, trade, administration or the law.

But a large group of non-native speakers meant that the French spoken in England was already starting to evolve, and the French words ended up with different pronunciations or even a different meaning. 

As early as 1175, the records show a Frenchman in England snootily remarking that: “My language is good, because I was born in France”. 

English and French started to part ways from the mid-1400s, by which time the two countries no longer shared royalty (the last English possession in France, the port of Calais, was lost to the French in 1558) and gradually systems such as the law courts and trade began to be conducted in English.

French remained widely spoken as a second language by the nobility and the elite right up until the early 20th century and French is still the most widely-taught language in UK schools.

The similarities

It’s not always easy to distinguish between English words that have a French root and those that have a Latin root, but linguists estimate that around 29 percent of English words come from French, another 29 percent from Latin, 26 percent from German and the rest from other languages.

But many of the English words that do have a clear French root are related to nobility, administration, politics and the law.

For example the French words gouvernement, parlement, autorité and peuple are clearly recognisable to English speakers. Likewise budget, revenus, enterprise and taxe, plus avocat, cour, juge, magistrat and evidence.

Amusingly, the French and the English obviously found time to share many insults, including bâtard [bastard], crétin, imbecile, brute and stupide.

Adaptation

But most of the people in England who were speaking French did not have it as their mother tongue, so the language began to adapt. For example the French à cause de literally translates into English as ‘by cause of’ which over time became the English word ‘because’.

There are also words that started out the same but changed their meaning over time – for example the English word ‘clock’ comes from the French ‘cloche’ (bell), because in the Middle Ages church bells were the most common method of keeping track of the time for most people.

When the mechanical clock began to appear from the 14th century onwards, the French used a new term – une horloge – but the English stuck with the original.

The differences

One of the big differences between English and French is that English simply has more words – there are roughly 170,000 words in the English language, compared to about 135,000 in French.

And at least part of this comes from English being a ‘blended’ language – that English people hung on to their original words and simply added the French ones, which is why you often get several different English words that have the same translation in French eg clever and intelligent both translate into French as ‘intelligent’.

Another difference represents the class divide that the Norman invasion imposed between the French nobles and the English labourers.

For example the words pig and cow both have Anglo-Saxon roots, while pork and beef come from French (porc and boeuf) – so when the animal is in the field being looked after by English peasants it has an Anglo-Saxon name, but by the time it is on the plate being eaten by posh people, it becomes French.

There’s also a tendency in English for the more everyday words to have Anglo-Saxon origins while the fancier words have French origins – eg to build (English) versus to construct (French). In French construire is used for both. Or to feed (English) versus to nourish (French) – in French both are nourrir.

Faux amis

One consequence of English and French being so closely linked in the bane of every language-learner’s life – les faux amis (false friends).

These are words that look and sound very similar, but have a completely different meaning. If you don’t know the French word for something you can have a stab at saying the English word with a French pronunciation – and often you will be right.

But sometimes you will be wrong, and sometimes it will be embarrassing.

READ ALSO The 18 most embarrassing French ‘false friends’

Often, faux amis are words that have changed their meaning in one language but not the other – for example the French word sensible means sensitive, not sensible – which is why you can buy products for peau sensible (sensitive skin).

But it once meant sensitive in English too – for example in the title of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility – over time the meaning of the English word adapted but the French one stayed the same.

The title

And a word on that title – La langue anglaise n’existe pas, C’est du français mal prononcé (the English language does not exist, it’s just badly pronounced French) is actually a quote from former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau.

He did apparently speak English, but doesn’t appear to have been very fond of England itself – his other well-known quote on the topic is: “L’Angleterre n’est qu’une colonie française qui a mal tourné” – England is just a French colony gone wrong.  

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