We tracked down 26 of the best courses for learning French, including 3 you can use for free. Our top picks right now are InnerFrench, Français Authentique and Coffee Break French. Every entry below is hand-checked, and the ones that teach you come first — with free options ahead of paid ones wherever they are as good.
The single best-known bridge between textbook audio and full-speed French: ~30-minute monologues on culture, history and psychology, spoken clearly at maybe 80% native speed, entirely in French with free transcripts. Podcast and YouTube channel are free; the structured courses (e.g. Build a Strong Core, DELF B1 prep) are paid. Genuinely too hard for A1–A2 beginners — start elsewhere and come here around solid A2/B1.
One of the oldest French-learner podcasts still going, built around the idea that listening a lot to clear, deliberately-paced French beats grammar drilling. Johan explains expressions and everyday vocabulary entirely in French, so it works as a first all-French resource once you're past absolute beginner. Hundreds of free episodes and videos; the 'packs' and academy are paid and marketed fairly heavily.
The structure is the appeal: Mark teaches, Anna learns and makes the mistakes you'd make, across four clearly-scoped seasons from A1 to advanced idiom. The audio lessons are free on every podcast app; the paid version (£199/$269 per season) adds video, lesson notes and bonus audio. Free-only is a perfectly viable path — you just don't get anything written.
Around 800 Alliance Française centres worldwide run in-person and online French courses, host DELF/DALF exam sessions, and lend French books and films to members. The teaching is properly qualified FLE instruction, which is what most self-learners are actually missing. Prices and class quality vary a lot by city, and the timetable commitment is real — check your local centre specifically rather than the umbrella site.
A public-broadcaster project running since 1996: every exercise set is attached to an actual broadcast clip, graded A1–B2, with teacher worksheets available too. It also has free TCF exam simulators that mirror real test conditions. Completely free with progress syncing across web and app; the interface is a bit institutional but the material is authentic and huge.
Weekly free lessons focused on real spoken register, cultural etiquette and the gap between written and spoken French — the stuff that makes learners sound stiff. Best for people who can read French reasonably but freeze in conversation. The paid side (30-Day Challenge at €39, Conversation Club at €69/month) is priced above most competitors, so try the free videos first.
Pierre has 15+ years teaching French as a foreign language and the catalogue reflects that: methodical grammar explanations, pronunciation work, and exam prep for DELF, DALF, TCF and TEF. Explanations are in French with occasional support, so it suits learners who want to leave English behind early. Free courses and a weekly newsletter exist, but the site funnels hard toward the paid Académie.
Its 'Brainmap' diagnoses your grammar gaps down to individual points and then feeds you targeted micro-quizzes, which is far more efficient than working through a grammar book front to back. The lesson write-ups (from the Lawless French team) are clear and free to read. It is deliberately narrow — no listening or speaking practice — so pair it with an input-heavy resource.
Breadth is the selling point: hundreds of lesson-sized audio and video episodes across every level, each with a dialogue, line-by-line breakdown, PDF notes and word lists. Quality varies between series and the site is relentless about upsells and 'sales' that never end. Best used with a cheap annual plan as a supplementary drip of structured material, not as your only course.
Geneviève's whole channel answers one question — why you understood your Paris textbook and cannot understand anyone in Montreal — through the vowels, the contractions, the tu-question particle and the words France does not use. Around 275 videos and 95k subscribers, free on YouTube, with paid courses and a members' area on the site. It is the best single entry point to Québécois for someone who already has school French.
Three parallel tracks (beginner, intermediate, advanced) mean you can stay on the same show as you improve, and each episode bundles a grammar point and an expression of the week. Transcripts and interactive exercises are the real value over free slow-news options. Subscription-only after a 7-day trial, which is hard to justify when RFI's Français Facile covers similar ground free — worth it mainly for the graded structure.
Vlog-style comprehensible input — cooking, errands, travel — narrated in French at a manageable pace with French subtitles. A gentler on-ramp than InnerFrench or Easy French because the visuals carry a lot of the meaning. Free YouTube library is substantial; the staged self-paced courses (French Foundations, Video Club, Master Comprehension) are paid and pricing isn't shown until checkout.
Elisa interviews French guests on cultural topics, which means you hear more than one accent and speaking style — useful once single-narrator podcasts feel easy. Free transcripts, glossaries and comprehension exercises accompany episodes, with paid structured courses alongside. Difficulty varies noticeably by guest, so expect some episodes to be harder than others.
Gymglish's French course sends one short, story-driven lesson per day by email and adjusts the next one based on what you got wrong, which builds a habit better than most apps. The humour is odd and very French, and you either enjoy it or find it grating. Subscription-only after the trial; the daily-email format means it suits busy adults far more than intensive learners.
Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, with the monthly price falling steeply on longer plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 14 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.
Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.
Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.
Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.
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.
Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.
Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.
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.
You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.
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.
You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.