Free French Language Lesson - Great Choices for Free French Lessons Online

Thanks to the internet we now have many more resources for learning to speak French than we ever had in the past. What's more you can start learning, the basics at least, using a number of sites that provide French language lessons absolutely free.

Over at the BBC website (the British Broadcasting Corporation) there are a number of really excellent starter courses for learning French. You can subscribe for a 12 week email course, you can take part in a quiz which tests your current level of French and suggests further study and, given a good internet connection, you can even take part in an interactive video course called 'Ma France' which covers a variety of subjects like eating out, asking directions, holidays, cooking and more. It's voiced by a native French speaker so you can hear what each French word sounds like. It's a superb way to start to learn French and it's absolutely free.

That's probably the most comprehensive set of French lessons but there are plenty of others. Just do a search on the internet and you'll find dozens. While writing this article I entered 'free French lesson' in Google and got over half a million results!

Of course a lot of those results are duplicates, and a lot of them are, frankly, rubbish, but if you take a bit of time to search around you'll find a few gems.

For instance, one thing I didn't find at the BBC was how to pronounce the French alphabet. Maybe it's there but I missed it, but it's not important because I found several other places with short audio clips so I could hear each letter.

A trawl around the internet will find free lessons for French days, weeks, months, greetings, food, clothes, romance, you name it there's somewhere online you can find the French for it!

The audio lessons or sound clips are the most useful, of course, because hearing the language is vital in understanding it and speaking it. Don't just rule out the sites that only offer written texts though - there's a lot there that can be useful too and the actual construction of French grammar is difficult to explain by sound alone - sometimes you need something written down.

I'm sure you'll come across some websites that you find frustrating. I certainly did. It's rather annoying, in my opinion, to click several times in search of French sound files only to discover that the written texts are free but you have to pay for sound. It's not that I object to paying necessarily, but I do object to being led along like that. Never mind, along with the benefits of the internet you're bound to find one or two sites that don't deliver.

Nevertheless, you can find free French lessons online and good ones at that. If they're limited in any way it's that those I've found can really only deal with the French language at the beginner level. Going on from that I'm afraid you'll have to pay. That said, there are some extremely good systems out there and many of those you can get a free sample of so you can try before you buy. Well worth looking into when you want to take your French lessons to the next level.

Get free, independent tips and advice on learning French plus six free professional French lessons here: how2learnfrench.com