French at A1: what actually works

The spaced-repetition workhorse. Mine sentences from your input, review them daily, the words stick. Ugly, free, and undefeated. (Costs money only on iOS.)

Old-school audio course built on natural dialogues and daily passive→active waves. A proven on-ramp from zero before you can self-feed input. The book + audio, not an app.

Audio-only, spaced-recall drills you can do hands-free. Great for building an early speaking reflex in the car while your ear catches up. Gets expensive; don't make it your whole plan.

The free, step-by-step roadmap for the immersion / input-first approach — exactly how to go from zero to fluent on comprehensible input. Read this before you spend a cent.

Real native speakers pronouncing any word, free. When the robot voice in your app sounds off, this is the human check. A tiny tool you'll use forever.

A huge free database of example sentences with audio across dozens of languages. Perfect for mining real sentence context for your Anki deck instead of memorizing naked words.

Free audio courses that teach you to THINK in the language — no drills, no homework guilt. Spanish, French, German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili. If your language is on the list, start here on day one.

The same beginner story, told and retold with rising complexity, in dozens of languages — free. A perfect first reading + listening loop for any language.

Bite-size audio lessons for Spanish, French, German, Italian and more — calm, structured, commute-friendly. Light on pure input but a friendly on-ramp for total beginners.

Fine for keeping a daily habit and a few hundred words. But the gamified tap-the-translation loop isn't comprehensible input — it builds streaks, not fluency. Use it as a warm-up, then go get real hours.

Streaks ≠ fluency — it's a habit toy, not real input.

More grammar-serious than Duolingo and the dialogues aren't bad. Still a structured-drill app, not input — useful as a paid supplement for early grammar, not the engine of your learning.

Paid drills, not real input. A supplement at best.

The famous one. Picture-matching with zero context or culture, priced like a textbook. It won't hurt you — but your hours buy far more on free comprehensible input. Skip it.

Picture-matching, no real context. Expensive for what it is.

The native-speaker clip videos are genuinely nice. The rest is flashcard gamification you could do better (and free) in Anki. Mine the clips, skip the points.

Anki does the SRS part better and free.

Clean app with a nice native-speaker-corrects-your-writing feature. But it's still a lesson-and-quiz treadmill — fine for structure, not a substitute for hours of real input.

Lesson treadmill. The peer-correction is the only edge.