Learn How to Speak French Online (Free Methods)

An excellent way to begin your French studies is to explore the many free courses and resources that are available online, and they're are a lot! Some that I like to use for French, or have used in the past, are:

The French Tutorial: www.frenchtutorial.com - This one was one of the first courses I went through online. It taught me a lot about French. Some of the things I learned here have become things that I don't even remember learning, but know!

DailyFrenchPod: www.dailyfrenchpod.com - I regularly listen to these podcasts. You can get lots of them for free via iTunes (hundreds!), and the topics generally pertain to current events at the time, so they are interesting.

Language Guide: www.languageguide.org - Although this site primarily offers grouped vocabulary lists (with sound), it also has a great grammar tutorial and French readings with sentence-by-sentence translations. It's a nice little site.

Here's a site I often refer to when I want to find free courses for a new language I'm studying: Free Online Language Courses.

Another free method I often employ is watching TV and listening to the radio. The producers' Web sites usually offer some online content. Here are a couple sites to get you started:

Radio French International: www.rfi.fr

TV5MONDE: www.tv5.org

One problem you can run into when learning just with TV and radio is the overwhelming amount of content. Where should you start? What's important to actually know? What if the content doesn't particularly interest you? Depending on your learning style, you might run into these problems. One way to start off and get some structure when you learn how to speak French online can instead be a free French course, such as Rocket Languages' FREE 6-Day French Course.

A supplementary method you can employ is the use of vocabulary lists. A site I recently found out about which uses some innovative approaches to learning is smart.fm. Also check out Language Guide, which I linked to above.

I only recommend this as a supplementary resource, though, because it's much better to learn in context.

The Internet is inherently an interactive platform. So doesn't it make sense to also make use of it to learn how to speak French online? There are a lot of ways to do this! I'll name a few, but you can easily search and find more.

Find friends and online pen pals on MyHappyPlanet and LiveMocha

I've had some luck with searching for people with whom to practice my French on MyHappyPlanet and LiveMocha. These are two online communities of language learners, just like yourself, ready to learn. There are a lot of French speakers who want to learn more English and wouldn't mind speaking to you in French. Don't worry about the rumors of the French not being outgoing - the benefits of these sites is that people come there because they want to talk to others!

As an extra bit of advice, I recommend first learning some French so that you can sustain something of a conversation. The free 6-day French Course could again be a good way to get the foundations down.

Internet Chat with Skype

Once you've met some people, you'll want to talk with them off of the site. The conversations tend to be too limited otherwise. This is where a chat program like Skype comes in. With Skype, you can both type and speak with your new acquaintances. The live, real-time communication is naturally a lot faster than email and can help you practice French.

You can get Skype from here:

Join a Language-Learning Community

Aside from the ones already mentioned, another great language community to check out is How to Learn Any Language (HTLAL). There, you can find forums about all aspects of language learning and speak with people who are interested in languages and in meeting others who are as well. They have a French forum if you want to practice reading (and maybe writing?) your French.

Rocket Languages also has the Rocket French Community - you can only read past posts for free, but it's got quite a lot of information built up. It's a good additional reference tool for your toolbox.

Subscribe to Language Blogs

Depending on how much enthusiasm you have for languages in general, you might want to subscribe to a language blog. These tend to feature interesting topics, and they vary from blog to blog. A couple of my favorites are Omniglot and Blang. OK...Blang is mine, but I still like it! You'll have ones you like as well.

I hope this section gives you some good ideas for getting interactive with your studies!

So, throughout this mini-site you've gotten an idea of all the ways you can learn French for free. However, you will quickly realize that it's sometimes hard to put all the stuff you learn together coherently, or that you may be able to find a good course somewhere, but the people who wrote the course are rather unavailable, or only available to paid-version members. You quickly begin to wonder if you could spend your time any more wisely.

That's a question to which the answer can vary; as you learn and use more languages, you get more of a feeling for what works best for you and what kind of instruction you need to seek out. That said, looking for a good French course to invest money in is another idea that will generally save you time. It's no secret which one I recommend on this mini-site: Rocket French! I've also included the free course link below.

Best of luck in your French studies!