Reading: what is said and what is silent
Final -e, -s, -t and -ent stay quiet; ou, oi, eau and ai are single sounds, not spellings to read letter by letter. Accents é, è, ê change the sound, never the stress.
French · for English speakers
Learn French for English speakers
5 minutes a day. Reading from the first lesson: which letters speak and which stay silent. Then short lessons on what English quietly gets wrong. Levels A1 → B2.
Reading first
French writes more than it says: final -e, -s, -t and -ent are silent. One rule per lesson, starting on day one.
Gender and articles, in colour
English has no gender at all. Six determiners, one colour each, one sentence of explanation.
Spaced review
Missed words come back at the right moment, not at random.
Five-minute lessons — from the first letter to the first conversation
Each unit is a chapter of ordinary life. Lessons alternate reading, listening, words to put in order, pairs to match, and a sentence to say out loud.
Introducing yourself
Je m'appelle… — name, nationality, where you live. Your first meeting with gender: why it is la table but le livre, and why English gives you no clue.
In a café, in the street
Order, ask the way, count to a hundred — including soixante-dix and quatre-vingts, which are arithmetic rather than words.
Family, work, the past
Talk about yourself in the present and the past; passé composé and the choice between avoir and être, from examples rather than tables.
Words chosen for an English speaker
The most frequent first. English took thousands of words from French, so hundreds are already yours — and a handful look identical and mean something else. Those are flagged before you meet them.
le painbread
la tabletablealready yours
le restaurantrestaurantalready yours
la librairiebookshopfalse friend: not a library
actuellementcurrentlyfalse friend: not actually
la monnaiechangefalse friend: not money
Articles and gender, in colour
English marks no gender and uses one the for everything. French asks you to choose, before every noun, a word your own language does not have. Instead of a table: six determiners, each with its colour and its question.
lemasculine, definite
le pain
the bread — the one we are talking about
lafeminine, definite
la maison
the house — gender is learnt with the word, not guessed from it
lesplural
les amis
the friends — the plural drops the distinction
unmasculine, indefinite
un ami
a friend, one of several
unefeminine, indefinite
une table
a table, mentioned for the first time
du / de lapartitive
du pain
some bread — a part of it, not the whole thing
Sounding right from the start
Three rules cover most of the distance between French you can read and French you can be understood in.
The stress is always at the end
It never moves: the last syllable of the word, and in speech the last syllable of the whole group. English puts it inside the word, and that habit is what gives an English accent away first.
Nasal vowels
on, an, en, in, un are one sound each, not a vowel followed by an n. English has none of them; Beelang gives them by ear and checks them with the microphone.
Silent endings and liaison
Petit ends in silence, petit ami does not: the quiet letter wakes up before a vowel. Every new word comes with how it is actually said.
A1 to B2, without skipping
The syllabus follows the European scale; a level ends when you can hold the conversation it promises.
Read aloud, introduce yourself, order, ask the way.
Talk about your day, go shopping, describe family and work.
Hold an everyday conversation, give an opinion, write a simple letter.
Argue a point, follow a film without subtitles, read a newspaper article.
Common questions
Do I need to know anything first?
No. The first lessons are reading: the alphabet is the one you use, but it is not read the way English reads it, and that is where we start.
How long each day?
A lesson is 5 minutes. One a day keeps the streak; spaced review brings words back on its own.
Is it free?
Starting is. Beelang Plus adds unlimited hearts, pronunciation checked by microphone and the grammar cards.
Which devices?
iOS, Android and the web — one account, one progress.
I would rather learn Russian
The same method teaches Russian — in English or in French.