How To Choose Which Words To Learn In French

Learning vocabulary takes time; that’s why you have to approach a list of vocabulary in a very organized way. If you don't know where to begin or in which direction to go, you will get lost in a sea of more than 300,000 words despite only needing about 2000 to speak fluently about common topics.

This is like walking in a desert in which you can’t even count on the stars to guide you, but without the sand in your shoes. Eventually, you will lose your motivation and might stop learning French altogether. This is not what we want, right?

There, follow the following tips to help you with your vocabulary!

The French language, of course, contains a lot of words, but we actually only use a very small percentage of them in our daily life. This is why the handful of words above can get you far, as long as you can use them correctly! Here is a list of the 50 most common words in French that are not only frequent, but are also used everyday.

What would an actual conversation in French sound like? If you go to France, people will ask you things like the following questions:

d'où tu viens ? [du ty vjɛ̃] (Where do you come from?)

pourquoi tu apprends le français ? [puʁkwa ty apʁɑ̃ lə fʁɑ̃sɛ ] (Why are you learning French?)
qu'est ce que tu fais ici ? [kɛ-s kə ty fɛ isi] (What are you doing here?)
qu'est ce que tu fais dans la vie ? [kɛ-s kə ty fɛ dɑ̃ la vi] (What are you doing for a living?)

You should be able to identify these questions quickly, and answer them quickly as well. This will allow you to have your first conversations with actual French people, in France! Be careful though, because lots of French people will want to practice their English with you too.

If you like these short sentences, you can download the full list I’ve created here. The document contains 300 short sentences and can be used as a conversation guide for lots of various situations.

As usual, practicing with a native speaker is highly recommended. You will improve your accent, learn to recognize words more quickly and best of all will quickly see which words you need to add to your personal list of words to learn.

Once you feel at ease, feel free to listen and use resources related to your personal interests via videos, podcasts or blogs. Learning vocabulary related to things you like will not only make learning more fun, it will also allow you to talk about more personal things like your hobbies in greater detail.

I hope that this article has helped you in knowing what you had to learn, in order to learn vocabulary efficiently. Don't forget that you can (and you should!) adapt any list to your specific needs like hobbies, work, studies and lifestyle. If you want to learn and practice the most useful words and sentences in French, just take a trial session with me!

Hero image by Atikh Bana on Unsplash