Journal
The Français Flow blog
Practical guides to learning French — the science of memory, study methods, and getting words to actually stick. Tap any French word to save it to your deck.
- 6 min read
Honestly Assess Your CEFR Level in 10 Minutes
A1? B1? 'Strong A2 on a good day'? Here's a 10-minute, no-cheating protocol for placing yourself on the CEFR scale — built on the official can-do descriptors, with the self-assessment traps that make most learners misjudge by a level.
cefrassessmentexam-prepdelf - 6 min read
French Nasal Vowels, Finally Broken Down So You Can Hear the Difference
vin, vent, vont — three nasal vowels, one confused beginner. Here's the full system: how nasal vowels actually work, the spelling decoder, when NOT to nasalize, and why modern French quietly dropped the fourth one.
pronunciationphoneticslistening - 5 min read
Forget Textbook Chapters: Why Your First 625 French Words Should Be Frequency-Ranked
Textbooks teach French by theme — colors, animals, classroom objects. Corpus research says that's backwards: the 1,000 most frequent words cover ~85% of everyday speech. Here's how to pick your first 625 words the data-driven way.
vocabularyfrequencymethodflashcards - 7 min read
Train Your Ear Before Your Mouth: The French Minimal Pairs That Trip Up Every Beginner
You can't reliably say a French sound your ear can't yet hear. Here are the minimal pairs — tu/tout, vin/vent/vont, pain/paix, les/lait — that trip up every beginner, and the ear-first order the research says actually works.
pronunciationlisteningminimal-pairsmethod - 6 min read
25 French–English False Friends That Will Embarrass You
préservatif ≠ preservative, excité ≠ excited, librairie ≠ library. 25 French words that look like English, mean something else entirely — including five that will genuinely make you blush.
vocabularyfalse-friendsmethod - 5 min read
The Complete Logic of le and la: Suffix Patterns That Predict French Gender ~80% of the Time
Is a French noun le or la? It's not a coin flip. A landmark corpus study found word endings predict gender ~80% of the time — here are the suffix patterns, and the exceptions worth memorizing.
grammargendermethodvocabulary - 4 min read
Why You Forget French Words (and How Spaced Repetition Helps You Remember Them)
You learn a French word, then forget it days later. That's the forgetting curve — here's how spaced repetition and Français Flow help words actually stick.
spaced-repetitionmemorymethodvocabulary