French for Travelers
Handle greetings, orders, prices, directions and misunderstandings in French with about a hundred well-chosen words.
This course is for members
$9 unlocks every course in the library, this one included, plus a credit to build a topic of your own and at least 10 new courses every month.
What you will learn about French for Travelers
The 7-day sprint
- Bonjour Opens Every Door. In France, every interaction legally begins, socially speaking, with a greeting plus a title, and skipping it makes even perfect French sound rude.
- Hearing French Sounds. French mostly drops the ends of written words and links what is left into smooth phrases, so your ears must expect phrases rather than separate words.
- Je Voudrais: Asking for Anything. Two frames, je voudrais for wanting and est-ce que vous avez for availability, cover almost every request a traveler needs to make.
- Numbers, Prices, and Times. Numbers are the only part of travel French where you must understand at native speed, so they need separate, mechanical practice.
- Finding Your Way. Direction talk runs on one question, où est, plus a short set of position words you must be able to recognize instantly when someone answers fast.
- Cafés, Restaurants, and Shops. Eating and buying in French follow fixed scripts, so learning the staff's lines matters as much as learning your own.
- Keeping the Conversation Alive. Fluency for travelers is really repair: a small set of phrases that slow the other person down and keep you in French instead of collapsing into English.
The 80/20: the 7 concepts that matter most
- The greeting ritual and vous
- Frames, not conjugations
- Silent endings, nasal vowels, and the u
- Numbers you can hear at speed
- Repair phrases
- Free vocabulary and its traps
- Scripts for the four places you will actually be
The core idea, explained like you are 5
French is spoken in linked chunks rather than separate words: the ends of written words are usually silent, and when they are not, they glue onto the next word, so understanding French means learning to hear phrases as single units.
Then the quiz and the ladder
10 questions that correct you when you are wrong, and beginner, intermediate, advanced levels, each with a practical exercise.