The short version. Study Flua for 20 to 30 minutes a day for as many weeks as you have before you go, and learn the handful of phrases below. The deck teaches the words people say most first, so every week you put in helps you understand replies, not only say your own lines.
Written by Sora Kalden, who builds Flua, so this plan puts Flua first. The reasons, and what Flua doesn't cover, are below.
A phrasebook gets your sentence out; the reply is where travellers get lost. In corpus studies of English, the thousand most common word families make up roughly 80 to 90% of the words in everyday speech (Nation, 2006), and French has the same steep curve, so they're the words in most replies. The French deck is 1,058 cards teaching 730 words in the order people say them most, and the forms it teaches make up 71% of all words spoken in French film and TV, counted from subtitles. The forms in its first 100 cards already make up 49% of the words spoken in French film and TV, and those in its first 300, 60%. Flua’s working estimate, from its founder’s own tracked study rather than a test, is about 14 hours to A1, which Flua sets at 700 words; at the same pace per card, the French deck is about 16 hours of study, roughly five weeks at 30 minutes a day. Your own pace shows after your first session.
Keep your reviews going, a few minutes a day. Try your French first, even when someone could switch to English; that's where the words you've studied start to come back on their own.
No independent study we know of measures how many hours any app, course or plan takes to get someone to a goal like this, so the hours here are estimates. Your own measured pace, which Flua shows after every session, is the number to trust. A few weeks won't make anyone fluent; they can take you through the most common words in the language and into your first real conversations.
Try the first cards free →Other plans: moving to France · a French exam · a job in France · a trip to France
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