The best app to learn French, and what none of them fixes
French is the language where reading and listening drift furthest apart. You can understand a written page and still catch nothing spoken, because so many endings are silent and words run together. That gap decides which app is worth your time.
We make Vocabloot, one of the five below. We have been direct about what it does not do, and for a beginner we recommend starting elsewhere.
Five French apps, and who each suits
Duolingo
- Best for
- Building the habit and basic reading
- Price
- Free with ads, around $7 a month without
- What it does well
- A well-developed French course that gets you reading simple sentences quickly, with enough repetition to make spelling patterns familiar.
- Where it falls short
- Weak on the listening gap. The audio is clear and slow in a way real French is not, so comprehension does not transfer as well as it should.
Babbel
- Best for
- Grammar and situation-based dialogue
- Price
- Around $15 a month, less on longer plans
- What it does well
- Explains gender agreement, the two past tenses and when to use vous rather than tu, which is where self-taught French usually goes wrong.
- Where it falls short
- Paid only, and it finishes. Its audio is more natural than Duolingo's but still studio-clean.
Anki
- Best for
- Vocabulary retention at scale
- Price
- Free, except $25 once on iPhone
- What it does well
- Best in class for retention, and French frequency decks are plentiful and good.
- Where it falls short
- No teaching, no audio unless you add it, and a steep tolerance requirement before it pays off.
Drops
- Best for
- Five-minute vocabulary top-ups
- Price
- Free for five minutes a day, around $10 a month for more
- What it does well
- Attractive and quick, with clear native audio on every word.
- Where it falls short
- Vocabulary only, no grammar, and a fixed list. In French, where liaison joins words together, isolated words only take you so far.
Vocabloot ours
- Best for
- Someone with basic grammar who wants everyday vocabulary
- Price
- Free during early access
- What it does well
- Point the camera at anything and it gives you the French word with its article, pronunciation and an example sentence. Learning le or la attached to a real object helps, since French gender has to be learned with the word.
- Where it falls short
- No grammar teaching, so it will not explain the passé composé or when a past participle agrees. It also will not fix the listening gap on its own. Use it for vocabulary alongside something else, and expect early-access rough edges.
The listening gap, and how to close it
Written French shows you endings that are not pronounced, and spoken French runs words together through liaison. Parlent and parle sound identical; les amis becomes one word.
No app on this list solves that, because they all feed you clean studio audio one word at a time. What does solve it is volume of real speech: InnerFrench and Français Authentique for podcasts, French television with French subtitles rather than English ones.
Use an app for vocabulary and grammar, and get your listening from material made for French people.
The honest recommendation
Starting from zero: Babbel if you can pay, Duolingo if you cannot. Both work; Babbel gets you to correct French faster.
Restarting after school French: Babbel, since it fills grammar holes rather than restarting at bonjour.
Reading comfortably but short of words: Anki or Vocabloot. Pick Vocabloot if you would rather learn the words for what is around you than work through a frequency deck.
Everyone, from week one: something spoken and real, every day, even if you understand almost none of it at first.
Try the camera approach
Snap anything and learn the word for it, with pronunciation and an example sentence.
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