Michelle Baumgartner Last updated: 16 Free Interactive French Exercises for Beginners
When you’re just starting to learn French, you might feel like you’re staring at a pot of barren soil.
Much like a pot full of plant seeds, you will need to give your French skills some patience and attention to grow into the stage where you mastered things like basic vocabulary topics and grammar concepts.
I’m here to give you some great, interactive French exercises that are aimed primarily at foundational concepts to get your French to flourish.
Contents
- What Are the Benefits of Interactive French Exercises?
- Interactive Exercises for Building Vocabulary
- Interactive Exercises for Checking and Improving Spelling
- Interactive Exercises for Learning Grammar
- Interactive Exercises for Practicing Numbers
- Interactive Exercises for Telling Time
- And one more thing...
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
What Are the Benefits of Interactive French Exercises?
Even beginners can jump right in.
As a French-language novice, it might seem like all you do is memorize words and grammar rules. But these interactive exercises will have you jumping for joy! They were designed to help any French learner master fundamental skills.
They require active learning.
When you’re just starting out, you’ll need to do a certain amount of passive learning, such as listening to French lessons or absorbing French music and audio. Interactive exercises will force you to actively apply the concepts you’re learning. A program like FluentU, for example, takes authentic French content like music videos and movie clips and adds interactive features in the form of subtitles you can click on for definitions, quizzes that let you choose, type or speak your answer and more.
Turning your passive learning into active, and interactive, learning will help you quickly and clearly see what skills you’ve mastered and where your learning gaps are.
You can practice many French-language skills.
There are tons of interactive exercises available online to help you study a wide range of French vocabulary and grammar themes. No matter what topic you need to study, you’re likely to find an interactive exercise that addresses it. We’ll cover several below, organized by the skill that they target.
Interactive Exercises for Building Vocabulary
Vocabulary Trainer
Begin with the basics. Test your vocabulary one word at a time with this simple, interactive platform.
Just hit the “New Word” button to present an English word. (If your native language is German or Spanish, the platform also lets you work with those languages.) Your job is to enter the corresponding French word in the “Answer” box—then select “Test” to check your response. The exercise automatically tallies the number of words you’ve translated correctly so you can easily track your progress.
When you’ve mastered the first set of words, this second vocabulary trainer set presents about a hundred more you can try.
Sow Grow Visual and Audio Vocab
Grow your knowledge of French words and phrases with this versatile exercise. You can specify your proficiency level (beginner or intermediate) and choose from a wide range of vocabulary topics, including everything from adjectives to the weather to health problems.
Rather than reading and translating words, with this exercise you’ll be listening to spoken French words and choosing pictures that match their definitions. In every round of the exercise, three flowerpots appear—each decorated with a different drawing. Choose the flowerpot with the image matching the spoken word or phrase.
Every time you choose the correct flowerpot, a rain cloud waters it, transforming it into a flower. Incorrect choices mean empty flowerpots. Create a sunny bouquet of blossoms as you progress through the exercise—and your ability to understand spoken French will bloom.
With audio and visual context, this exercise stimulates both your ears and eyes—and the lively sensory input will secure new words in your memory. Plus, with its wide range of vocabulary topics, this exercise handily supplements your more focused studies.
French Food Game
Feast on food words. Serve yourself a table full of food to identify in French.
In this exercise, you’ll have to select the correct food or beverage to match the target French-language food word. Watch the food float through the air, propelled by magical forces that defy gravity. After a few meals, the exercise ends—with an empty table, and a full stomach.
The engaging visuals keep your attention throughout the exercise. If you’re unsure about some of the vocabulary, click the “Learn words” button to review before you start the exercise.
This exercise is available in both an audio and text version, so you can tailor it to your particular learning style.
French Colors Game
Color your world. Strengthen your grasp of French colors with this exercise reminiscent of the electronic Simon Says game.
Before starting the exercise, you can review your French color words by using the “learn” feature. Take your pick of the audio or text version. See if you can click rapidly through the exercise without getting tripped up!
After you’ve identified a few individual colors, this exercise ups the ante by asking you to replicate sequences of colors—with French color words as your only guide.
Interactive Exercises for Checking and Improving Spelling
French Hangman
Execute a winning game of Hangman. Improve your French spelling and escape the dastardly hangman’s noose.
Use the clue in English and the onscreen keyboard (complete with accented letters) to save your stick-figure life by making as few spelling mistakes as you can.
When you want to start over, just click on the square with the gallows inside of it.
By guessing letters when you’re uncertain about the target French word, you’ll begin to internalize common French letter groupings and orders.
Visual Spelling Game
Bee all abuzz about French spelling. Even if you can’t find a French spelling bee near you, you can still prove your French spelling prowess with interactive exercises.
Sharpen your French spelling skills by picking the correctly-spelled word or phrase from a list of options.
This game comes from the same site as Sow Grow, and again, you have tons of vocabulary topics to choose from.
When you begin the exercise, a picture of the target vocabulary word will appear on the left side of the screen. Choose the correctly spelled French word that matches the picture. But choose carefully—some of the options are nearly identical. You can always try the same topic again; the choices are randomized, so each attempt is different.
This exercise improves your comprehension by encouraging careful visual scrutiny of text—and the more you do the exercise, the more French spelling will become second nature to you.
Interactive Exercises for Learning Grammar
How/where/when…
Ask all the important questions—French journalist style. Knowing how to formulate questions is essential to holding conversations with native French speakers. Practice your interrogative French vocabulary as you fill in the blanks with the correct question words by using context clues.
Once you’ve filled in a blank, choose the letter “C” next to the answer box to check your answer. If you were correct, asterisks will appear around your text. Equal signs will appear if you missed the mark.
Select Réponses (Answers) at the bottom of the screen to see the answer key, and Effacer (Erase) to restart the exercise.
Thinking about the context of the questions and their answers will cement your recollection of each French question word. Ready for more? Try part two and part three of these interactive, inquisitive exercises.
Challenge Board: -er, -ir and -re Verbs
Verbs are where the action is. Learning to conjugate the three main types of regular French verbs (-er verbs, -ir verbs and -re verbs) is one of the most important steps in being able to express yourself in French. Learning these conjugation patterns also means you can easily incorporate new (regular) verbs into your vocabulary.
This Jeopardy-like quiz board takes you through a series of regular verb conjugations.
A word to the wise: if you have autofill turned on in your browser, consider turning it off temporarily or clearing your cache if you want to repeat the exercise. Otherwise, your previous answers will reappear when you start to type, which can get distracting.
The randomness of this exercise provides a more natural way of practicing verb conjugations than memorizing and reciting the standard je/tu/il… (I/you [singular]/he…) pronoun paradigm. Because you’re not just rattling off conjugation patterns by rote, you’ll have to think more carefully about which conjugation is correct.
Interactive Exercises for Practicing Numbers
Numbers Game
Use basic arithmetic skills to increase your mastery of the first dozen written numbers in French. Choose from eight possible answers to a simple addition or subtraction problem.
This exercise is timed, so keep an eye on the hourglass!
Zipping through these calculations with nothing but the French number words for clues will force you to use the French words functionally (it’s great practice for paying/asking for change in a French store). You won’t have time to translate each number from English, since the potential answers will be presented in a different order each time.
Writing 1-100
Go digital. Show your comprehension of French number words by writing the right digits to match them.
The clues are arranged so that easily-confused numbers are presented one right after the other—highlighting possible pitfalls, and causing you to stop and think about the correct answer.
Ready to venture into higher mathematics? Write the correct numerals for French words in the deux cent (two hundred) to mille (one thousand) range.
Writing Ordinals
Master ordinary ordinals. First, you learned cardinal numbers—un, deux, trois (one, two, three), etc. Now you can put things in their place with this fill-in-the-blank ordinal number exercise. It’s first class and second to none!
Rather than just reciting the ordinals in numerical order, the context of the sentences will reinforce the meaning of each ordinal.
French Bingo
Hit the jackpot with bingo. No French-language bingo parlor in your neighborhood? No worries! You can practice visual and auditory comprehension of French numbers from zéro à
cent (zero to one hundred) with this nifty online bingo game.
This French-language version differs slightly from the traditional bingo board, since the numbers aren’t arranged in columns by letter. Instead, any number from zero to one hundred can occupy any square on the board, which adds to the challenge.
Feeling zen? Try the untimed game by choosing the green circle with just the play button. For more of a high-energy bingo parlor experience, select the play button with the hourglass for a timed game.
A virtual bingo “caller” will announce each number. You’ll also see the number written out in French at the top of the board. If you click the wrong number, the caller will repeat the correct one until you find it.
When you hit the bingo jackpot, you’ll hear a triumphant “Tu as gagné!” (“You won!”).
The randomness of the numbers takes you off autopilot and encourages you to think about the clues you’re seeing and hearing. The timed version spurs you to master French numbers even faster.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
P.S. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)
Interactive Exercises for Telling Time
Visual Time-telling
Rock around the clock. Timepieces from many different eras materialize on the screen, but only one matches the time written out in French. Hone your sense of French time by picking the correct clock.
If il est huit heures (it is eight o’clock), for example, you must choose the digital or analog clock with the corresponding time.
As the exercise progresses, you’ll encounter more challenging variations, such as il est dix heures et quart (it is ten-fifteen).
The wide variety of clock designs continually challenges you to find the target time, no matter how it’s presented visually. The different conversational phrasings teach you several different ways to indicate the same time.
Writing Dates
Spell out the years. Write out the French words for the years when events like the storming of the Bastille and the Battle of Waterloo occurred. This exercise internalizes those French year-words, which are rarely written out but often used in conversation.
If you’re not sure of the correct year, just select the question mark right under the name of the event.
Spanning the centuries, this exercise teaches you the patterns for forming the names of years in any era. Plus, you’ll get a nice primer on the major events in French and world history.
Months and Days Game
Conquer the calendar. March sequentially through the year, identifying the days of the week, followed by the months of the year. Seasonally-appropriate pictures serve as additional clues.
You can review the French calendar words and their pronunciations before you begin the exercise. While the words are presented in calendar order, the multiple-choice answers are randomized and keep you thinking throughout the exercise.
Similar-looking options help ensure you’re paying full attention so you can make the right choices.
Units of Time
Traverse time from minutes to months. Use French words to identify units of time on a clock and a calendar. Later in the exercise, your view from a virtual window gives you the hints you need to choose the correct times of day and seasons of the year in French.
The vocabulary list on the initial screen provides a refresher before you begin the exercise. The charming illustrations of the tree that changes over time link specific mental images to abstract concepts, as do the highlighted parts of the clocks and calendars.
When you’re just starting to learn the most basic words and concepts in French, you might feel like you’re just a petite (little) seedling in a francophone forest. These interactive French exercises will help you sprout up and branch out into a mighty arbre (tree).
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.)
