🇫🇷 The best books for learning French

'Le Bescherelle' is the reference French natives themselves reach for on conjugation, organised by verb model so you can classify any verb you meet. The books are cheap and the brand now covers orthography and grammar too. The website has some free exercises but the value is in the printed volume; as a pure reference it teaches nothing on its own.

CLE International's series is what most serious French courses actually use, split into débutant (A1), intermédiaire (A2/B1), avancé (B1/B2) and perfectionnement (B2/C2) volumes. The rigid left-explains/right-drills layout makes it genuinely usable for self-study, and answer keys are sold separately (buy them). Entirely in French, so a true beginner may want a bilingual grammar alongside the A1 volume.

Two volumes — Beginners (A2–B1) and Intermediate Learners (B1–B2) — each with eight short stories, bolded glossary words, plot summaries and comprehension questions per chapter. The deliberate vocabulary control means you can read a whole chapter without stopping, which is the point. Story quality is functional rather than literary; treat it as reading-fluency training, not literature.

Short, funny chapters narrated by a child, which keeps sentences simple and vocabulary concrete while still being authentic native writing rather than a graded reader. It's the traditional first 'real book' for French learners and the audiobooks and animated adaptations make it work for listening too. The playground slang is dated 1960s French, and the humour needs a bit of cultural patience.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

A reading app built around finishing complete books: you pick a story at your level, tap a word or reveal a sentence's English translation when you get stuck, and it saves the words you looked up. There is one complete free book in every language and you can read a free chapter on the website without installing anything; the rest of the 1,100-book library is paid. The library is uneven: Ukrainian, Indonesian and French have dozens of stories, while Icelandic, Estonian and several Balkan languages have one or two. It is not the same as Storyglot's European Portuguese readers (storyglot.com), which are a separate project with the same name.