French Vocabulary Charts

📘 How to learn vocabulary that sticks

• Learn words in context — each chart pairs the words with real sentences you can listen to.
• Little and often beats cramming: 10 minutes a day with one chart.
• Say everything out loud — use the 🔊 buttons to check yourself against a native voice.
• Do the mini-exercises at the bottom of each chart to lock it in.

🇬🇧 How to actually keep the words you learn (the method behind these lists)

The uncomfortable maths of vocabulary: recognising a word list is easy, and forgetting one is easier. What makes new words stay is frequency and context — meeting the word where it lives, in a phrase you might say. That’s why every French vocabulary list on this page is themed around a real situation (ordering food, checking the weather, surviving a meeting) and gives each word an example sentence, not just a translation. A word learned inside « je voudrais un café, s’il vous plaît » carries its grammar, its register and its pronunciation with it; a word learned from a bare list carries nothing but its spelling.

Method, in three habits. Say everything aloud — French pronunciation lives in the mouth, not the eye, and the audio-first learner wins every listening comprehension contest later. Steal whole phrases — native speakers speak in chunks (« ça marche », « n’importe quoi », « il fait beau »), and expressions are vocabulary with the assembly already done. Revisit on a schedule — five words a day beats fifty on Sunday; spaced repetition is just the polite name for meeting words again before you’ve lost them. Pick the list closest to your actual life, master it, use three words from it in your next lesson — then take the next. A thousand well-chosen common French words cover an astonishing share of everyday speech.