French

You can read a French sentence you cannot hear.

Written French and spoken French come apart further than in almost any language you might pick. Reading with the audio running, and the spoken sentence lit up as it goes, is how the two get put back together.

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Français

Why it stalls

Half the letters are not pronounced, and the other half run together.

You learn that "ils ont" is two words, then hear "ilzon" and recognise nothing. Liaison, elision and a spelling system that preserves letters nobody has said aloud for centuries mean the page and the recording feel like different languages. Learners who read well and listen badly are the single most common kind of French learner.

On the page

Reading and listening at the same time

There is no pronunciation layer to put over French, because the problem is not the individual word. It is what happens to words when they touch.

Press play and the sentence being spoken is highlighted as it goes, so your eye is on the words at the moment your ear hears them run together.
Dialogues are cast with a different voice per speaker, which makes it far easier to follow who is saying what at speed.
Tap the speaker on any word to hear it on its own, then hear it again inside the sentence. The difference between those two is most of what makes French hard to catch.

One tap

The word answers you where it stands.

Not the first entry in a dictionary list, but what the word is doing in this sentence. Hear it, ask about it, or save it, without leaving the line you were reading.

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So it sticks

Every word you save comes back at the right moment.

Saved words join a review queue built on spaced repetition, and each one keeps the sentence you met it in. Your French queue is its own: learn three languages at once and none of them bleed into the others.

How the review works

French

Questions worth asking first.

Will this help my listening, or only my reading?

Both, and deliberately. Where a piece has audio you can read and listen at once with the spoken sentence highlighted, which is the pairing that fixes the gap. Reading alone will not do it in French.

Is the French from France or Quebec?

Mostly France, since that is where most of the publishers in the library are. Anything you bring yourself works the same, so a Quebec podcast or news site can be pasted straight in.

Can it explain grammar, or only translate?

Ask it why. The tutor takes the questions a dictionary cannot: why that tense, why that gender, whether anyone would say this out loud. It knows the passage you are reading, so you can point at a sentence rather than describing it.

Or learn another. Or three at once.

Start with something you actually wanted to read.

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