French Language Resources

You may find these resources helpful before you start your French language courses.

We recommend you work on as many of these features as you can, preferably in a structured environment with a professor’s or tutor’s feedback. A simple grammar book is always useful. Start watching videos in French on YouTube, listen to easy podcasts, listen to music, and watch movies. Get the sounds and rhythms of the French language inside you, even if you cannot understand them yet. If you expose your brain to French upstream, you won’t be as surprised on the first day of your language program, and less tired as the program continues. You can find many YouTube videos on all of these grammar points, in both English and French.

  1. Être and avoir: présent, imperfect, future and passé composé
  2. Recent past: je viens de…
  3. Immediate present: Je suis en train de
  4. Near future: je vais…
  5. Expressions idiomatiques avec être and avoir
  6. Basic verbs for everyday action (eating, traveling, etc.)
  7. Infinitive construction, e.g. je vais marcher, je veux marcher, etc.
  8. vouloir, pouvoir and devoir: présent, imperfect, future and passé composé
  9. Key differences between 1st group (…er), 2d groups (…ir) and 3rd group (…re) verbs
  10. Basic differences between regular and irregular verbs
  11. Key adjectives and their changes (masculine, feminine)
  12. Key adverbs (…ment)
  13. How to ask closed and open-ended questions
  14. How to make negative statements in French (ne… pas, ne …plus, ne… jamais, ne … rien)
  15. Reflexive (Je me demande…) and reciprocal verbs (nous nous téléphonons)
  16. Definite (le, la, les, l’) and indefinite articles (un, une)
  17. Partitive article, singular and plural (de, de la, du, des)
  18. Possessive adjectives (mon, ton, son…)
  19. Démonstrative adjectives (ce, ces…)
  20. Two key prepositions (à, de)
  21. “Il y a”
  22. “Il est” and “c’est”
  23. Basic numbers and colors
  24. How to tell the time, day, month and year
  25. Basic expressions of weather
  26. Comparative (plus que, moins que) et superlatives (le plus, le moins…)
  27. Interrogatives (where, when, how, etc.)
  28. Reading and speaking about daily tasks and immediate experience (travel, weather, family, simple social and business transactions, etc.)
  29. Basic expression of opinion (I agree, disagree, etc.) on basic, everyday topics and immediate experience

Websites for dictionaries and conjugation