Top 5 Sites for French Reading Practice Exercises (for All Levels)
You have probably read French materials before, but did it feel like you were just going through the motions?
Reading practice is great. Necessary, even. The challenge is doing it effectively and actually improving your comprehension.
So in this post, we will highlight five powerful resources for French reading practice exercises. They come with questions and other tools to help you determine whether you really understood what you read.
Contents
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
The Top 6 Sites for French Reading Comprehension Exercises
Lingua French Reading
Lingua is a good place to start. They only have readings for CEFR levels A1 (beginner), A2 (upper beginner) and B1 (intermediate).
Not only are the readings clearly listed by level of difficulty, but you can also see the word count to the right of each one’s title.
Although their selection may seem small, the passages cover a fair variety of formats from everyday dialogues to descriptions of places. Furthermore, each one is accompanied by a few multiple choice questions in French.
Another helpful feature of Lingua is that you can easily download each passage as a PDF to work with offline.
Or, if you prefer physical paper, print it out! Tangibly circling words to look up or underlining interesting grammatical constructions can be quite the fruitful practice.
Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the French language and culture over time. You’ll learn French as it’s actually spoken by real people.
FluentU has a wide variety of great content, like interviews and web series, as you can see here:
FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive subtitles.
You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used.
For example, if you tap on the word "crois," you'll see this:
Practice and reinforce all the vocabulary you've learned in a given video with FluentU's adaptive quizzes. Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning and play the mini-games found in the dynamic flashcards, like "fill in the blank."
As you study, FluentU tracks the vocabulary that you’re learning and uses this information to give you a 100% personalized experience.
It gives you extra practice with difficult words—and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned.
Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)
LanguageGuide.org
LanguageGuide divides its reading exercises into three parts: beginning readings, jokes and advanced readings. Each reading is accompanied by an audio recording.
The jokes are quite short, but do offer good practice. This is a nice place to go if you are getting a bit bogged down with reading about someone’s fictional vacation or a French cultural description.
LanguageGuide’s advanced readings feature literary excerpts from Guy de Maupassant, a well-known French author from the 19th century.
LanguageGuide has a few other unique features. Difficult words are underlined so you can hover over for the definition. If you are really stuck, hover over the ending punctuation mark of a sentence for a full translation of that portion.
Do not cheat, though! Only do this if you absolutely cannot figure out the meaning on your own.
For beginning readings and jokes, you have the option of hiding the text while the recording plays. Thus, you can practice listening by seeing how much you understand before reading the passage.
Once again, if you are already there…
French-Resources.org
This one has intermediate and advanced reading exercises. Several have a headphones icon under their title, which means that exercise also has a listening component.
This resource, with its variety of dictation, multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank exercises, is highly interactive.
You do have to give your email before you can actually complete an exercise, but they do not ask for money.
Once you have access, each answer is graded individually and if you give the incorrect answer (for fill-in-the-blank questions), you will be provided a helpful hint, such as the first letter of the correct answer.
Le Point du FLE
I love this site, which basically does the hard work of finding quality reading exercises for you!
In fact, your only problem may be too many options!
Le Point du FLE links directly to specific reading exercises spanning dozens of websites. All levels from beginner to upper-advanced are represented, and each link has its CEFR level listed to the right.
Most (if not all) of the passages have some kind of accompanying exercise. The fact that so many different sites and resources are represented makes for great variety in the format and subject matter of each one.
Following the tips and taking advantage of these resources will definitely have you not merely reading French, but reading French effectively.
These French reading practice exercises help ensure that you are paying attention and really understand the meaning. Dictionaries and other features will help expand your vocabulary and ultimately your reading ability.
With practice, you might even be able to read annoying French bumper stickers.
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
And one more thing...
If you like learning French on your own time and from the comfort of your smart device, then I'd be remiss to not tell you about FluentU.
FluentU has a wide variety of great content, like interviews, documentary excerpts and web series, as you can see here:
FluentU brings native French videos with reach. With interactive captions, you can tap on any word to see an image, definition and useful examples.
For example, if you tap on the word "crois," you'll see this:
Practice and reinforce all the vocabulary you've learned in a given video with learn mode. Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning, and play the mini-games found in our dynamic flashcards, like "fill in the blank."
All throughout, FluentU tracks the vocabulary that you’re learning and uses this information to give you a totally personalized experience. It gives you extra practice with difficult words—and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned.
Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)
