French gives English speakers a head start on the page and takes it away in the ear: you will recognise thousands of words in writing and fail to catch them in speech. That gap makes recall practice with audio unusually valuable, and it is why every card here can be played aloud. Gendered nouns add a second fact to every vocabulary item — the word and its article — which is precisely the kind of paired detail that leaks away without scheduled review.
Why spaced repetition suits French
What English speakers find hard about French
- Liaison and elision: written word boundaries disappear in speech, so listening lags reading badly.
- Grammatical gender, largely unpredictable and required for every article and adjective agreement.
- The passé composé versus imparfait split, plus choosing between avoir and être as the auxiliary.
- Nasal vowels and the u/ou distinction, which English does not use contrastively.
Cards you might meet
Generated from whatever theme you name — these are the kind of thing that comes back.
le dépaysement
the disorientation of being somewhere foreign
Often positive in French.
flâner
to wander with no destination
échouer
to fail; to run aground
l'ambiance
the atmosphere of a place
râler
to grumble, to complain
French conjugation drills
Name a verb, pick the tenses, and get five fill-in-the-blank sentences with every answer marked — including near-misses where only an accent is wrong. Available tenses:
PrésentPassé ComposéImparfaitFutur SimpleConditionnelSubjonctif PrésentImpératif
What you get
- SM-2 scheduling with four grades and keyboard shortcuts
- Generated French vocabulary on any theme you name
- Pronunciation for every card
- Conjugation drills across 7 tenses
- Writing feedback on your own sentences
- Photo vocabulary — name what is in front of you
Popular French themes
food & diningcity lifeworktraveleveryday life
French questions
- Is French harder than Spanish for English speakers?
- Reading is often easier — the shared Latin and Norman vocabulary is vast. Listening and pronunciation are harder, because French elides across word boundaries and uses vowel distinctions English lacks. Most learners find the difficulty arrives later than in Spanish rather than being greater overall.
- How does Language Flash handle French gender?
- Generated noun cards carry the article, so you learn "le dépaysement" rather than a bare noun. Reviewing the article as part of the card is the difference between knowing a word and being able to use it.
- Which French tenses does the conjugation drill cover?
- Présent, passé composé, imparfait, futur simple, conditionnel, subjonctif présent and impératif — selectable individually or as a mixed set.