4 French Frequency Lists That Are Music to Learners’ Ears
Don’t you just hate it when you practice your French for hours on end, only to completely freeze when someone asks, “Comment ça va ?” (How are you?)
It happens to all of us.
Sometimes we can recite beautiful, old French poetry or discuss classical music with style but we can’t answer a simple, practical question.
If this has been happening to you, then you need a French frequency list!
Contents
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Why You Need a French Frequency List
French frequency lists are a great way to learn the essentials from the very beginning.
They are, essentially, lists of the most commonly used words in the language. They’re much more than simple vocabulary lists, they’re comprehensive guides that include all parts of speech.
It just makes sense to learn the words that will be most useful to you in everyday life before anything else. With a practical list of French words, you’ll be able to apply them immediately rather than trying to remember them for ages before getting to make use of them.
This will help you memorize words faster as well, since using words on a daily basis is the best way to commit them to memory.
Whether you’re a beginner and in need of all the top French words or an intermediate-advanced student looking to fill in the gaps, I recommend the following four online resources, each well-suited to optimal learning.
As a bonus, they’re all completely free!
French’s Greatest Hits: The 4 Hottest French Frequency Lists
The Lexiteria
The Lexiteria is actually a company that creates word lists for other businesses. However, they’ve made one very useful French frequency list available to the public.
Their list contains the top 200 French words that came up in their research of French web pages. If you want the longer version (with over 423,000 words), you have to pay for it.
Their chart is broken down into rank, word, part of speech, how many times the word showed up in their research, how frequent the word is per million words and the number of letters in the word.
The list contains everything from commonly used prepositions and pronouns to important vocabulary words.
AnkiWeb
AnkiWeb is a website for constructing flashcards and one of my favorite places for a French frequency list.
Aside from using the format of flashcards, the main thing that sets them apart from the previous two databases is that they include the English translation with each word, so you don’t have to waste time looking it up.
Their flashcards include 5,000 commonly used French words and are accompanied by all sorts of information.
For example, not only will you see the part of speech, rank and frequency, but you’ll also get loads of example sentences in both English and French, as well as audio recordings of both the French words and example sentences.
AnkiWeb is a fantastic resource for learners. After downloading the flashcards, you’ll be able to make personal changes to them if you want, adding helpful notes, flagging any words that you struggle with and changing how many details you want to be presented on each card.
In order to download these flashcards, you’ll need to download the Anki program first, which is easy to do and completely free.
A Frequency Dictionary of French
This list was compiled by several professors at Brigham Young University with the goal of allowing language learners to have access to a frequency list that was easier to navigate.
The list has been published as a PDF and contains a useful introduction on how to approach the guide.
The data has been collected from both written and spoken resources and contains a list of 5,000 useful French words.
My favorite thing about this list is that it has been organized in several different ways, making it really easy to find what you’re looking for. You can search by frequency, alphabetically or by themes like animals, transportation or verbs of communication.
Additionally, there are tons of example sentences included that learners will find very helpful.
This frequency list is one of the easiest to read, as rather than giving you tables with tons of abbreviations, they simply write their entries exactly as you’d expect to find them in a dictionary, with English translations of both the words and example sentences.
éduscol
This website is actually run by Le Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale (the National Ministry of French Education) and contains lists of the 1,500 most frequently used words.
As it’s a French site, English definitions aren’t provided, but the lists are still quite helpful for knowing exactly what you should be studying.
Each available list contains the same information but is organized differently. For example, one list contains 1,500 words in alphabetical order and another displays them in order of their frequency.
The lists are available to be downloaded as Excel spreadsheets, PDFs or Open Office documents and each contains additional information on the words such as part of speech, frequency, etc.
Now that you have some great resources to get you started, try to master the most commonly used words on the lists above before moving on to the rest. Use them daily, but vary your study methods—practice with your chosen resources on some days, and seek out the terms in French media on other days.
You can see which words pop up in French short stories, and listen out for them in movies and series. The online language program FluentU also comes in handy for practice, as its French media clips have interactive subtitles that can help identify common terms and their examples for usage.
Hopefully, the next time you’re asked a simple question in French, you can answer with:
“Je vais très bien et maintenant, je suis un pro au français !” (I’m doing very well and now, I’m a pro at French!)
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)