Stop trying to learn "French"
French is not one thing. There's the formal written register that grammar books teach. There's Quebec French. There's North African French. There's the casual spoken French of Paris. These overlap, but the gap between them is large enough that aiming at "all of French" wastes weeks. Pick the one you actually need. For most people heading to Paris: spoken Parisian French. That's a much smaller, more attainable target.
The week-by-week plan
Week 1: Survival ritual
Master 50 phrases that handle 80% of tourist interactions: greetings, ordering, asking the price, paying, leaving. Bonjour, merci, s'il vous plaît, je vais prendre…, l'addition, vous prenez la carte ? Don't worry about conjugating anything. Just memorize whole chunks.
Time: 15 minutes a day. Method: chunk repetition with audio.
Week 2: Listening tuning
Now you can produce a few sentences. The next bottleneck is comprehension. French swallows vowels and runs words together. Drill listening: hear a phrase, repeat it, only then read the transcript. Build the muscle of catching j'sais pas as a single unit instead of three words.
Time: 15 minutes a day. Method: shadow native audio.
Week 3: Real conversations
Layer in dialog patterns: how to ask for something at a counter, how to ask for directions, how to apologize, how to make small talk. The goal is not new vocabulary — it's stitching the chunks you already know into longer exchanges.
Time: 20 minutes a day. Method: scenario practice (we built ParleFlow's Scenarios mode for exactly this).
Week 4: Personality + slang
By now you sound functional but bland. Add a few softeners and slang words to give your speech texture: du coup, en fait, ouais, t'as raison, c'est ouf. Each one you internalize buys you several "I sound like a real person" points.
Time: 15 minutes a day. Method: hear it, copy it, deploy it.
What to skip
- Conjugation tables. You'll pick up correct conjugations from hearing them in context. Memorizing tables in isolation is a famously slow way to learn.
- Subjunctive mood. You'll get away without using it for a long time, and you'll absorb it through exposure.
- Vocabulary you'll never need. "Paramount," "rummage," "intricate" — your textbook teaches these. Skip until you have a real reason to know them.
- Reading literature. Beautiful, but it's a different language than the one you'll speak.
The single principle
Spaced repetition of full conversational chunks beats any other method for this goal. You're not trying to win a French degree — you're trying to handle real exchanges. The chunks are the curriculum. Memorize them and put them on the shelf in your head; the grammar emerges on its own.