🇫🇷 Best French websites for beginners

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.

The French ministry body that owns the DELF and DALF diplomas publishes sample papers, audio files and marking criteria for every level for free. Even if you never sit the exam, a past paper is the cheapest honest assessment of where you actually are. Sitting the exam itself costs money and must be booked through an approved centre; the site is bureaucratic to navigate.

Laura K. Lawless has been writing French reference material for over two decades and the archive is enormous: grammar lessons, verb tables, pronunciation notes, listening and reading exercises, all free. It's a lookup resource rather than a course — there is no path through it — so use it to answer 'why is it like that?' while learning elsewhere. Design is dated and ad-supported, but the content quality holds up.

Hosted by Le Figaro, this is the fastest way to check a conjugation, including the tenses textbooks skip (passé simple, subjonctif imparfait) and notes on tricky agreements. Also handles reflexive and negative forms and has grammar rule pages alongside. Free and ad-supported; it's a lookup tool, not a learning path.

RFI's learner platform pairs real international news with a player that shows the transcript as it plays and lets you slow the audio down. Content is graded by level and comes with comprehension and vocabulary exercises added weekly. Entirely free and updated daily — probably the best free listening-plus-reading combination for French, and it doubles as a way to keep up with world news.

A no-frills archive built up over many years: short dialogues, dictées, verb-tense audio drills and phonetics exercises, each with the text on the page. Ideal for absolute and early-intermediate learners who want deliberate practice rather than entertainment. Free and ad-supported; the site design is plain and navigation is more list-than-curriculum, so you pick your own path.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

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.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.