I can read fine — but forget it, as soon as someone starts speaking, I’m lost. 

I can’t figure out how to understand native speakers. 

I should be able to understand native speakers, but I can’t. 

Anyone who’s ever learned a language is familiar with this scenario. They can read. They can write. 

They can watch a movie in their target language — as long as it’s subtitled. 

As soon as they need to rely on their listening abilities, though, they’re lost. 

The problem is that this compounds a common problem: It’s simply harder for most people to understand a foreign language when it’s spoken than when it’s written out. That’s made more difficult by the fact that reading is usually a private act — but listening happens in company with other people. That means other people are waiting for you to understand what they’ve just said — which ups your stress level. According to no less august an institution than the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, stress is one of the biggest problems encountered when learning a language. Get stressed out and your learning abilities tighten up. And chances are, if a new landlord just gave you a speech about which circuit breaker is yours and which is the one you are never, ever supposed to touch — yeah, you might be pretty stressed out. 

Scribe is for people who can’t understand native speakers. 

Scribe is a modern update on the centuries-old language instruction tool known as dictation training. Someone speaks and you listen — and you listen so well that you write down what you’ve just heard. In a way, it’s what we’d all like to do when we can’t understand someone in their native language: listen to what they’ve said over and over again, until we can figure out what we’ve just heard. (This process is made up of phonemic awareness and lexical segmentation — basically, gaining the ability to understand the unfamiliar sounds you’ve heard as well as the ability to understand where one word stops and another one begins). 

With Scribe, you can listen to the text of a given video ad infinitum — or ad nauseum. (Unless you have a very patient language partner, you’ll find this sort of perpetual-rewind hard to locate outside of Scribe.) Play it once or 50 times, at regular speed or slowed down. Keep listening, and listen well, and you’ll begin to suss out different words. That’s dictation training. 

Yabla’s Scribe makes this kind of practice easy. As you watch — and listen to — each video, you’re tasked with filling in the blank spaces beneath it, Hangman-style. Any missing accents? You’ll need to figure out where those go. Any weird “um”-style words — the bens, the ugh, the uhs, the heins? You’ll need to understand those words/utterances and spell them correctly in order to move on to the next section of the video. The good news is that you can try as many times as you like — you’ll never flunk out. Get it right faster, and you’ll earn extra points, which will make a difference if you’re paying attention to the Leaderboards. If you’re just there for the skill building, though, you can take your time and totally focus on distinguishing an “on” from an “in” from an “en” — or whatever it is in your target language that trips up all the newbies (and many of the vets, too.) 

There are a lot of ways to learn to understand native speakers. Among the best, though, the options are limited to those that are expensive (see: extremely patient teachers) or possibly more all-encompassing than you can handle (see: moving to a small corner of the country where your language is spoken, and ensuring that you never speak anything but that language to anyone, even if they’d prefer to speak their pretty good English rather than your beginner-level take on their native tongue.) Scribe is inexpensive, fun, and effective. Outside a very patient partner, who falls in love you with a little more with each pronunciation error, it’s quite possibly the best option on the planet for learning to understand native speakers. 

It won’t surprise you to hear that we’re sure Yabla’s the better choice — after all, you’re reading this on yabla.com. Of course we think it’s better. But it’s an easy case to make (and here’s a full rundown of all Yabla’s best features).

Here we go: 

Yabla vs Fluentu: Video Quality
This is the big one: Yabla produces its own huge library of language videos. Last time we checked, Fluentu’s video library is made of recycled YouTube content. Sure, that’s fine, and we have plenty of YouTube videos made by other media companies as well. 

Many of Yabla’s best videos, though, were created just for our users, with their language-learning needs in mind. We’ll walk you through fine grammatical principles, offer dramatic readings with excellent enunciation, and dive into the cultural worlds connected to each of the languages we offer. 

YouTube videos are fine, but our huge range of videos created just for you is a major difference, and one we’re really proud of. 

Winner: Yabla

Yabla versus Fluentu: Scribe
Scribe is our best feature. It’s the one we’re proudest of — it has a patent, for goodness sake, it’s that good and that terrific at what it is. Scribe is modern dictation training. Trust: We can go on and on and on about the benefits of dictation training, a position we share with master linguists and the people responsible for training, say, CIA agents to speak like a native. (Read more about that here.) 

With Scribe, you’ll watch a video, and then you’ll write down exactly what you heard. Along the way, you’ll develop your phonemic awareness and lexical segmentation — basically, the skills you need to understand the unfamiliar sounds that make up foreign-language words, and the ability to differentiate one word from another. 

Supplementary features within Scribe let users slow down the video, fill in words one letter at a time, and use our powerful dictionary to figure out the meaning of new words. The better you do, the more points you’ll earn, and the higher you’ll appear on our Leaderboard, if that’s something you’re interested in. 

Nothing can replace Scribe, and we’re the only ones who’ve got it. 

Winner: Yabla

Yabla versus Fluentu: Languages Offered
Yabla offers Spanish, Italian, French, German, English, and Chinese. NGL, Fluentu offers more than us. But we’re pretty sure that if you’re learning one of our six languages, you’re better off with us. 

Winner: Anyone learning Spanish, Italian, French, German, English or Chinese

Yabla versus Fluentu: Price
Yabla is $12.95 per month, $54.95 for six months, or $99.95 per year. Fluentu is more than twice that: $29.99 a month! 

Now, there’s a logic behind that: With Yabla, you’ll have access to a single language. WIth Fluentu, you’ll have access to all of their languages. So — if you’re skimming lots of stuff at once, sure — go with Fluentu. But if you’re looking to knuckle down, and truly get fluent with a single language, it’s obvious that Yabla’s your best bet. 

Winner: Yabla

With a bit of work, it’s easy to go from new to beginner — and beginner to immediate — in most foreign languages, including French. Sentence structures are cleaner. Teachers speak simply and clearly. Your focus is on the clear (“Do you like apples?”) versus the colloquial (“How you like them apples?”)

Moving from intermediate to advanced is a different story, and that’s where Yabla can help, with its array of five different fun, engaging, and effective programs. Here they are, from simplest to most challenging:

1. Multiple Choice

Using a huge library of videos taken from across the francophone world, Yabla offers a selection of games — all of which will see you improve your language comprehension abilities. The first is multiple choice, which is exactly like it sounds: Listen to a text, and then select the word the speaker says — it’s as simple as that. You can’t pause the video, but you can slow it down. Yabla’s videos are categorized into a wide variety of levels of complexity, from newbie to advanced beginner to advanced, so you work with more and more difficult material as you improve.

2. Fill in the Blank

Unsurprisingly, Fill in the Blank works exactly as you’d think: Listen to a narrator speak, then fill in the blank in the text with the missing word. Like with Multiple Choice, you can’t pause the speaker, but you can slow it down (and listen to it as many times as you need to). This is a step harder than Multiple Choice, since you’re on your own for the entire word, accents aigus and all.

3. Scribe

Scribe is so great it has its own patent — it’s most users’ favorite game among all our intermediate French lessons. Here’s how it works: See all those gray boxes above? It’s your job to figure out what text should go there — so everything has to be on point. Your spelling, your grammar, all the “Je m’en” and “J’suis” of colloquial, spoken French — all your skills are put to the test. Get everything correct, though, and you’ll progress to the next round — trust when we say it’s kind of addictive.

4. Vocabulary Review

Do you know your nounous from your Miu Miu? Your hors norme from your hors d’oeuvres? The difference between percer and bercer? Increasing your vocabulary is a key aspect of intermediate French lessons, when you’ve got chat and chien down pat and can now develop your thoughts more fully with an ever-increasing selection of available words. Vocabulary review tests your vocabulary in both directions — from French to English and from English to French — so you won’t be caught short when trying to express your own ideas about the dessinateurs publicitaires and the nounou meeting up at the chantier.

5. Speak

Speak is the latest addition to Yabla’s intermediate French lessons — and it is a doozy. If you’ve been coasting on your mid-Atlantic (i.e. vaguely Washingtonian) accent, that’s not going to work with Speak. It’s just like it sounds: Yabla provides the soundtrack, and it’s up to you to accurately repeat what you’ve just heard. It’s wild — and you’ll find yourself forced to go all out on your “accent,” a process that usually takes years of exposure to native-ability speakers. Speak is your chance to profoundly improve your accent — and speak French like you’re château-born.

Want to improve your French listening comprehension quickly? Try Yabla stress-free for 15 days.

Photo by Léonard Cotte.

The four games below are accessible via the orange Games button beneath each video. 

SCRIBE

Scribe is the best tool that Yabla offers. It’s what we’re proudest of — Scribe itself and the patent it was awarded for its unique technology. 

Here’s how it works: Scribe is based on the centuries-old language-learning technique of dictation training. (Want to learn more about dictation training? If it’s good enough for the CIA, it’s good enough for us. Read more about it here.) Dictation training is the key practice in learning how to distinguish the unfamiliar sounds that are part and parcel of understanding a new language (a.k.a. phonemic awareness) and where one word stops and another one starts (a.k.a. lexical segmentation). There’s no better tool for improving your listening comprehension outside of paying a stranger to talk at you for hours and hours, repeating themselves as you require. 

With Scribe, you’ll choose one of thousands of videos in your target language. Then, you’ll listen to that video — and literally transcribe what you hear. It’s way more than a spelling challenge — your job is to catch all the tiny words, hesitations, the ums and ahs and ughs and bens and bahs (your hesitation words will vary depending on what language you’re learning). 

Scribe will help you out where it can. You’ll be filling in the blanks, Hangman-style — so you’ll have a rough idea of where the word breaks should fall; you’ll just need to listen closely to pinpoint them. You can also fill in letters as you need them, in case there’s a word here or there that you just can’t hear clearly. 

Of course, you can listen to each piece of speech as many times as you need to, slowing it down as you like (look for the helpful button shaped like a turtle). And if you make mistakes, you’ll lose points (this is only a big deal if you’re paying close attention to the leaderboard — which, maybe you are, maybe you aren’t) but retain the ability to keep trying until you get it right, even if it means through whizzing through the alphabet A-Z to see what fits (uh, not that we’ve ever done that.) 

Make Scribe the core of your Yabla practice and you’ll get better at your target language faster than you thought possible, and before you step foot into your destination of choice. 

FILL IN THE BLANK

This is just what it sounds like: This is just what it sounds like. Listen to the video of your choice, then fill in the blank in the sentence you’ve just heard. In its own way, this tricky little game can be harder than Scribe. You’ll be doing a lot less transcribing — with Fill in the Blank, you only need to transcribe certain words, rather than the entire speech — but unlike Scribe, you don’t know exactly how many letters are in the word you’re solving for, and you don’t fill them in as you do with Scribe, Hangman-style. With Scribe, it’s easy to choose between homophones — like in French, with Scribe you’ll know if you want “c’est” or “ses” because you’ll either have three or four blank spaces for letters. With Fill in the Blank, you’re on your own. 

MULTIPLE CHOICE

Multiple choice is especially useful as you’re moving between ability levels — say, from intermediate to advanced. It will provide the transcript of a given video, and you’ll be asked to choose the missing word from an array of possibilities. It’s easier than Fill in the Blank, because you’re selecting the word rather than coming up with it on your own, but it’s a great way to learn unfamiliar words that you haven’t encountered before. You have the option here, too, to slow down the video if that helps you understand better. 

VOCABULARY REVIEW

Vocabulary review is an excellent companion to Scribe: You’ll listen to a video, and then quiz yourself on the definitions of the words you’ve just heard. With Scribe, you can get into the habit of transcribing words with unfamiliar meanings without truly understanding them, as long as you can hear them well enough to type them out. This is especially a problem with false cognates — words that look familiar to English speakers but fail to live up to expectations. (For example: the French word “actuellement,” which means “currently,” rather than “actually” — for “actually,” you’d want something more like “en fait”). With Vocabulary Review, you’ll avoid these tricky mistakes, while constantly expanding your vocabulary. 

DICTIONARY

Yabla offers a powerful dictionary feature — no need to dip out to go check a word on Google Translate. Even better, it’s set up to automatically save your searches for later review. You can translate either way — from your target language into your native language or vice versa.

TRANSCRIPT

Want to review an entire video, start to finish? Just hit the Transcript button, which will display the video’s entire transcript, in both the target language and the English subtitles. It’ll also show the rate of spoken words per minute, which can be a useful approximation of its difficulty level. 

LEADERBOARD

If you didn’t know where to look, you might not know that Yabla has a robust gaming section. With all of these games, Yabla will reward you for how well you perform, offering more stars the better you do. Go to the leaderboard section to see how your efforts stack up — Yabla tracks stats for each game individually and then all-around, with status going to those who’ve performed best over the previous 7, 30, and 90 days, as well as all time. That means that even if you’re just starting out, with a strong performance you can show up on the leaderboards in as quick as a week. 

FLASHCARDS

Yabla’s Flashcards are incredibly robust. Just click on a word in a video and it’ll save to a set of your Flashcards, for easy review later. With a couple clicks as you review, you can find its translation, as well as the text for how it originally appeared in the video you saw, plus the translation of that video text. There’s also a link to that video, in case you want to review it again. 

Together, all these tools make Yabla the best online language learning tool. Try them all! 

You’re in line at a French bakery — or a Spanish tapas bar, or an Italian caffé. 

Maybe you’ve learned a bit of the language back home. Maybe you know your grammar and can read pretty well. 

But.

When people speak to you, you just can’t quite understand. And understanding native speakers is what’s keeping you from true fluency — from building relationships, shopping with ease, renting an apartment, and dating cross-culturally. 

If you’ve ever thought: I’ve almost got it — but I can’t understand native speakers. 

Yabla has the answer. It’s called dictation training, and it’s the missing tool you need to go from proficient in any language to truly fluent. 

TL;DR: Our Scribe tool is your MVP is developing true fluency — and to fully understanding native speakers. 

For a deeper dive, keep reading. 

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Dictation training is the language-training method used by the organizations that need to ensure that their people speak foreign languages like natives. We don’t know for sure that Homeland’s Carrie Mathison learned Arabic and Farsi through dictation training, but we’d bet a bunch of money on it. This is more than an educated guess: Academic papers support the use of dictation training at the highest level.

Take, for example, this report by Erin O’Reilly of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center on “Language Counseling Trends: Implications for Beginning Language Learner Strategy Instruction.” (The DLIFLC, by the way, provides language training to members of the military and government agencies including the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of State in a dozen languages, including Modern Standard Arabic and several dialects, Chinese, Farsi, Russian, and others.) 

This gets a little complicated, but it adds up to something important. In her report, O’Reilly says: 

“The rationale behind dictation is to practice segmentation, and [learners can be] encouraged to play difficult audio passages repeatedly to puzzle out word boundaries.”

Puzzling out word boundaries, as well as discriminating between different vowel sounds, are the crucial acts of understanding new words — and understanding new words, of course, is the key to building your vocabulary. Importantly, that’s an aural vocabulary — words you understand when spoken — rather than just your normal “vocabulary,” or words you understand when read.

“Phoneme discrimination is an essential requisite to successful vocabulary acquisition which in turn augments listening skills.”

The better you can discriminate between phonemes, the better you can learn words. (Without getting way too technical, “phonemic awareness” is the “ability to segment words into constituting sounds and blend these sounds to form new words,” say researchers studying English language learners.) The better you can discriminate between phonemes, O’Reilly says, the better you can determine “lexical segmentation” — which is the ability to figure out where one word ends and another begins. 

Unsurprisingly, that’s a necessary part of understanding native speakers. 

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Deep listening, then, is the key to all these practices. (Master your phonemes, and you master your cross-cultural dating opportunities. It’s weird, but that’s how it works.) 

Deep listening — in fact, gamified listening — is what Scribe offers. 

Here’s how it works: Yabla offers a wide variety of videos pegged to an equally wide variety of ability levels, from newcomer to advanced. With Scribe, learners are tasked with transcribing the spoken portion of each video, accents and all. Fewer errors mean a better score, but participants can listen to each video portion as many times as they’d like. 

While few American children learn English through dictation training, that belies its influence elsewhere — for example, French schoolchildren still practice their native language’s intricate rules and agreements by transcribing their teachers’ spoken texts, a practice known as la dictée. 

Yabla’s Scribe digitalizes that process — and it’s by far the most sophisticated dictation system ever developed. (Ergo that patent, which none of our competitors can match.) 

Dictation training helps accomplish all this: phoneme recognition, lexical segmentation, and general understanding. Scribe is dictation training. You listen, you write, you see what you got wrong. 

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If dictation practice sounds like a one-person, foreign-language spelling bee, that misses a big part of the point. 

To do well on Scribe, correct spelling — again, including those accents — is imperative. But there’s more to it than that for language learners. Again, what dictation practice really offers that cohort is the recognition of small and often unfamiliar, indivisible units of words, and lexical segmentation — understanding how and where words are separated one from the other. (If you doubt the cruciality of this skill, you’ve never been the silent witness to a fast-moving rant in a language you didn’t understand — or a conference discussion, book club chat, German-speaking Peloton coach pep talk, or similar.) Materials prepared for basic-level learners often feature speakers who leave big gaps of air around their words — but lexical segmentation becomes more critical as we leave this made-for-beginner’s sphere and journey into the world of native speakers, where slipperiness between words is a fact of life. (Not to mention the liaisons in languages like French, which concretize those linkages — and account for why the word second word in “quand on” is pronounced with a “T,” or “t’on.”) 

As this study maintains: 

“Dictation is a valuable language learning device that has been used for centuries. Its advantages are numerous. … The major implication of this research for language practitioners is that employment of the dictation techniques in the language classroom is a creative diversification which might serve a number of aims such as writing practice and listening comprehension.

The study also notes that at its worst, dictation exercises can become a sort of spelling bee: “[As] it is used in foreign language classes, it … [has] changed into a tool which just tests spelling ability. The teachers slow down the speed norm to assist learners to write or even they read the text word by word with unusual pauses.” 

In this sense, Yabla’s Scribe is far superior to a classroom environment. For one thing, unless you’re studying your own, native language, dictation offers primary challenges other than spelling. (Hot tip: Don’t use Scribe if you already speak the language natively.) If you grew up speaking French, and you do a Scribe exercise in French, then, yes, indeed, you’ll basically be testing your spelling. For everyone else, you’ll be doing the hard work of learning unfamiliar sounds and figuring out how to separate words as you hear them — i.e. you’ll be practicing your phonemic awareness and lexical segmentation, or discerning words from a waterfall of sound. 

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That’s why Scribe easily vaults over the number one problem with dictation training: when it’s used simply to practice spelling. But its digital application has other advantages, as well. 

Unlike a sympathetic teacher, the speakers in Yabla’s videos won’t slow down to make it easier on the students. Sure — if they choose to, language learners can easily adjust the speed of the video to make it slightly easier. But the original video moves at the intended speed — which in many cases is the quick-quick-quick pace of ordinary, spoken speech in other countries. 

Scribe further assists with lexical segmentation by doing some of that segmenting for its users, who are asked to fill in Hangman-style blank letters. Consider it a leg-up — even if it’s difficult to aurally differentiate the end of one word from the start of another, Yabla does offer a small clue in suggesting that a break between words exists, even if it’ll leave it to you to figure out the words on either side of that break. 

In a classroom environment, like a traditional dictée, students might be asked to transcribe what they hear and turn it into the teacher — maybe with a couple additional rounds of listening to hone their comprehension. 

With Scribe, though, the power really rests with the learner, who can re-listen to the same block of speech however many times they like, at slower rates of speed if they find that helpful. Scribe will let them correct their mistakes, listen again, and try again. Sure, it’ll cost you points if you make mistakes — and Yabla users who pay attention to their position on the leaderboards don’t take that lightly. But students have the power here, and the choice: They can test themselves and make a run for top scores with a minimum of errors, or they can fully engage in learning mode and work out what they’re hearing in a low-stress, low-stakes environment specially since they started to promote the new bulk delta 8 gummies. 

And if they really can’t figure it out? With one tap, Yabla’s Scribe can reveal a single letter, a sentence, or the entire answer — though they’ll need to do it letter by letter, so that at every step they’re challenged to take the hint and figure out the rest on their own. 

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Most language learners write and read better than they hear and speak. The problem, of course, is that the former skills are perfectly appropriate for a classroom environment, when reading foreign-language texts and then responding to those texts can be a rewarding and productive — if perhaps limited — experience. 

It’s in the real world that listening and speaking become more important — the real world full of new places and new people, which for many of us is the reason we learned another language to start with. Reading Proust in the original French is all well and good — but a new French relationship, business partnership and they keep their financial records in order for this business, or artistic collaboration seem more likely to be the truly life-changing experiences, and for those, we can’t just read and write our way into emotional intimacy; it’s no different from texting on a dating app. The point isn’t to text — it’s to meet in person and truly get to know the other person. In language learning, the skills required to do that begin with the ability to understand a native speaker. And there’s no better tool to accomplish that big, important job than Yabla’s Scribe. 

Why is French pronunciation so difficult?

Every language poses its own challenges to non-native speakers — French among them. This is particularly true for anglophones. There’s no precise English equivalent for many of the sounds required to convincingly speak French: the R in Montmartre, the U in rue, the nasal sound required by en and on and many other words (or syllables) ending in N or M. Add to that the many lettres muettes (silent letters) and the knowledge required to understand that the C is spoken with avec and silent with porc.

Add liaisons to all that. For many native speakers of English, liaisons — like those linking the final S of nous to the beginning of the word allons — can look … rather optional. But for a native French speaker, that linkage can be the difference between a clear sentence and a mishmash of sounds.

How can I improve my pronunciation?

If you’re looking for French pronunciation practice, one good option is conversation with a native speaker, whether IRL or online — for example, with a partner-finding service like Conversation Exchange. Any online course, like those offered by WICE, will improve some level of pronunciation work. And listening to French will only help — like our favorite French-speaking vloggers, podcasters, and books.

All that said: Group classes don’t always allow much time for French pronunciation practice, while a conversation partner might not have the patience to listen to you repeat quand on until you’re perfectly linking those two words (and remembering that quand gets a T sound when liaising.) Which is why a program like Yabla’s Speak can be so valuable.

Is there an app for French pronunciation?

Yabla’s Speak.

Yabla’s Speak challenges users to listen to a French-language video and then repeat what they’ve just heard. It’s as simple as that. It’s also as hard as that — it can be tricky to get the pronunciation just-right enough that Yabla Speak’s sophisticated tech will move you forward to the next set of spoken texts. But you’ll get better, and that is the name of the pronunciation game.

Yabla’s thousands of videos run the gamut from authentic news reports to music videos to tours of French cities like Strasbourg — all featuring native French speakers. (Try one here!) Yabla offers a number of different tools for practicing with those videos, including multiple-choice comprehension quizzes, vocab review, and Yabla’s patented Scribe feature. Together, all these skill-building games are super powerful.

Yabla’s Speak, though, puts all those challenges together: You’ll need to listen to the video, then repeat it. That means rolling your Rs just to the right degree, and leaning into the nasal sounds that for many English speakers can sound like an exaggeration. But over time, Speak gives users the French pronunciation practice they need. And it works, and there’s nothing better than that.

You can try it now for free for 15 days.

Above: Photo by Nil Castellví.

Learn French Online: Yabla

Yabla is an excellent tool for learning French online fast (and you can try it now free for 15 days!) You’ll watch fun, informative videos — and there’s something for everyone, whether you’d rather take a tour of the Eiffel Tower, see the French village of Montmorency (above), or listen to a music video featuring the Rwanda-raised singer Corneille.

Yabla offers a variety of tools — including vocabulary review, multiple choice comprehension questions, and advanced tools like Scribe and Speak, which will challenge your speaking and oral comprehension abilities better than anything outside of an IRL trip to Paris. (Find out here why Speak can improve your spoken French level so fast.) If you want to improve your skills while engaging with authentic French content, this is for you.

Learn French Online: Conversation Exchange

Conversation Exchange is like non-romantic Tinder. The website looks a little rickety, but it works just fine: You’ll set up a profile, describe your language needs and ability, and then reach out to potential language-exchange partners. (People can also reach out to you — you’ll come up in their search results more often if you log in frequently and exchange messages with other users.)

Conversation Exchange isn’t moderated, so you’ll need to use the same common sense and privacy protections you would meeting any new person — you can use Conversation Exchange to arrange meetings both in person and online. It’s free, though, and it can be a great way to meet people once you get to a francophone country, or from the comfort of your living room if you opt to meet online.

Alliance Française

Usually when people think of the Alliance Française, they think of the big cultural institutions in major cities like New York, London, and Washington D.C. In fact, there are over 800 Alliance Française chapters around the world. Australia has 31 chapters, while the U.K. has 11. There are 100+ chapters in the U.S., in 45 states — from Central Iowa to the Alliance Française du Maine in Yarmouth. Find one near you here.

While most chapters hold in-person events — like Tour de France watch parties and French movie discussions — many of those are now also being offered online. Want to take a French baking class? Or join an intermediate-level French book club? It’s easy, and often free or very inexpensive.

Learn French Online: WICE

WICE is the sort of organization that many anglophones end up joining once they’re settled in Paris. Short for Where Internationals Connect in English, WICE offers language lessons as well as online French experiences that can be difficult to otherwise access, like a history of French fashion or a tour of Paris’s sumptuous private mansions. It also offers excellent writing classes, in English, that draw largely from the anglophone community in Paris. While those won’t help you improve your French, they will introduce you to a welcoming, creative community writing in the tradition of Paris-based expatriates of the past like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

France 24

You probably already know about Radio France International’s easy-French newscast. The next step is translated media. French news organization French 24, for example, publishes in French, Spanish, English, and Arab — meaning that you can read an article in French, and then test your comprehension with the full English translation.

There’s plenty of interesting subject matter — like this story, part of their coverage of the bicentennial of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. Published in English and French, it covers Napoleon’s relationship with “son éternel rival britannique.” It’s a great way to testing your reading comprehension while staying up to date on the news that matters in France.

Many online tools can provide newbies with the first, elementary instruction in a new language.

The trick is moving beyond advanced beginner — to intermediate and beyond.

That’s where Yabla can help — with a huge array of authentic Spanish videos, and skill-building games that are fun and entertaining as well as super effective.

Sign up for Yabla free for 15 days and you’ll have the chance to play games like these, below.

1. Multiple Choice: Intermediate Spanish Lessons

The first one is exactly what it sounds like. Listen to a spoken text in Spanish, and select the word you’ve just heard. Even for total newbies, this is an excellent way to get your ear accustomed to the sound of Spanish, as spoken by native speakers. Yabla has thousands of videos — from news reports and mini-documentaries to original, instructional videos created uniquely for Yabla. This huge library means that you can grow with Yabla as your listening skills improve.

2. Fill in the Blank: Intermediate Spanish Lessons

Fill in the Blank is just what it sounds like: Listen to a text in Spanish, and then fill in the missing word, or words. Along the way you’ll learn about interesting things happening in the Spanish-speaking world — like with this video, a tour of the Museo de Historia Mexicana in Monterrey, Mexico. You can try it out here!

3. Vocabulary Review

The Vocabulary Review game makes sure that you understand everything you’re hearing. First you’re tested on translating the word from Spanish to English — then with the slightly more difficult task of going from English to Spanish. Here, you’re being tested on the translation of the word finalizar. Want to see how well you’d do? Go here.

4. Yabla Scribe

Scribe is Yabla’s award-winning, patented tool for improving oral comprehension. Listen to one of our videos — and then type out exactly what you hear. You’ll need to get everything correct — accents included — to move on, but Yabla can provide a couple hints if you get stuck. There’s truly no faster, more effective way to improve your listening abilities than with Scribe. Taking dictation has never been so fun, or educational. Want to see how you’d do with a free sample video? Try one of our intermediate Spanish lessons — like this one. Or learn more about how Scribe works here.

5. Comprehension

Comprehension tests exactly what you’d think: how well you understood the video you just watched. Listen to a brief segment of the video, then answer a few questions based on what you heard. This game ensures that you’re not just “hearing sounds” but actually fully understanding the spoken texts — it’s excellent practice for conversing with Spanish speakers, or simply listening to Spanish-language podcasts, vlogs, and movies.

Yabla is a super-fun, super-effective way to go farther, faster, as you master Spanish. Try it now for 15 days free!

Photo by Alex Motoc.

Maybe you first learned French at an American high school. If so, the French word for “we” was probably one of the first things you learned: “nous.”

Nous sommes américains. Nous allons au cinéma. Nous voyons le chien.

Easy, right?

Sure, things become a little more complicated when the reflexive gets involved — nous nous amusons bien? — but it’s pretty straightforward.

Until you arrive in France, and you stop hearing “nous” — and hear, in its place, “on.”

(Want to try Yabla’s award-winning tools for understanding spoken French? Your first 15 days are free!)

Here’s a scene familiar to fans of the Netflix show, Call My Agent — in this scene from the third season, Matthias is meeting at a café with the César-winning actor Gérard Lanvin. And Gérard is asking his agent: On est en où? Or: Where are we?

But as you see, he’s saying “on,” not “nous.”

The situation becomes even more pointed in Julien Doré’s song, “Nous.” If you aren’t already familiar with the French artist’s work as a musician and filmmaker, you might remember him from Call My Agent as well — he’s Gabriel’s competition for Sofia’s attention.

In the video for his song “Nous,” we can see how quickly he moves from “Nous” (the title) to actually discussing the subject of what “we” are — he moves immediately to “on”:

In fact, it’s even easier to see in the official lyrics for the song, which renders the phrases like this:

Nous
On ira voir la mer

Then there’s always the famed English expression “On Wednesdays, we wear pink” — translated by francophone crafters as “Le mercredi on porte du rose.”

We in French: A Complicated Matter

So what’s happening here?

Despite what you might have learned in high school, “nous” isn’t always the only, or the best, way to say we in French — especially in spoken French, or in casual conversation, whether oral or written. In practice, French speakers will use “on,” which is conjugated like “il” or “elle.”

On va au cinéma. On voit le soleil. Chez nous, on s’amuse.

That’s easier to understand when you consider that “on” might translate more fully as “one” — as in:

Here’s that same moment from Lord of the Rings in French meme:

And indeed, “on” is used both in that general sense of “one” and the more specific sense of “we.”

One more thing: The English usage of a non-specific “one” and the similar usage of “you” have some overlap. (Consider: “You don’t simply walk into Mordor.”) In French, both cases would use “on.”

You’ll definitely see “nous” used for we in French in more formal situations and speech. For example, here’s a typical tweet from French President Emmanuel Macron:

Si nous voulons réussir le défi climatique, nous devons accélérer sur la protection de la biodiversité. Le combat est le même. Nous avons engagé l’action au #OnePlanetSummit en janvier. Les rendez-vous sont fixés. Nous devons le faire. https://t.co/PJY3p6lv9v

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) April 22, 2021

As you see, he’s written that “Si nous voulons réussir le défi climatique, nous devons accélérer sur la protection de la biodiversité.” This was translated by his office as “If we wish to beat the climate challenge, we need to move more quickly to protect biodiversity.”

There you have it: When you’re addressing the gathered leaders of the world at a climate conference, you’ll want to use “nous.” For most other circumstances, if you’re trying to say we in French, you’ll probably want to reach for “on” first.

Interested in learning more about how to use the French pronoun “on”? Check out this lesson on why “on” sometimes appears as “l’on.”

It’s often the final stumbling block for people learning French online. They can be quizzed on the correct conjugation of aller every day for weeks. They might have long ago memorized the difference between du pain and de l’eau. Maybe, after several months (or years) of online study, they’re pretty good at reading written French.

But then you arrive in Paris, and everyone’s speaking 100 miles/kilometers a minute, and it feels like you haven’t learned a single (useful) thing. You know French — but it might suddenly feel like you have no idea how to speak it.

That’s where Yabla comes in, with an impossible-to-beat tool: Yabla Speak.

Speak French Better With Yabla Speak

Yabla Speak is a doozy.

It’s not necessarily hard to speak French. It is monumentally hard, for many native speakers of other languages, to speak French well. There’s the R sound, which you’ll need to master before losing your keys — since that will necessitate a call to the serrurerie. There’s the difference between un and une, which might be bigger than your French teacher suggested. There’s mastering words like écureuil, which, for many anglophones, are just … a mess.

With Yabla Speak, you’ll watch fun, informative videos — and then repeat what you’ve just heard.

If that sounds too easy, it’s not. Yabla Speak is smart enough that it can distinguish between mumbly, halfhearted French and precise, emphatic French pronunciation. It won’t let you move forward until you get close to the second one.

Take this video — Daniel Benchimol tour of St-Jean-de-Luz, in the Basque country of southwest France:

You’ll listen to Daniel as he takes us on a tour of St-Jean-de-Luz. And every sentence or so, you’ll be asked to repeat what he’s just said.

It’s harder than it looks (in a good way) because the software is trained to require a “French accent.” Mumbling through with your normal anglophone accent won’t work — you really need to go for it, in ways that might feel silly. In so many ways, this is the hardest part of speaking a language well. What feels slightly ridiculous at first can actually be the difference between being understood and not being understood by native speakers. What feels slightly ridiculous likely is, in fact, better pronunciation.

Yabla helps you get over that first step — to achieve what we’ve called “Shameless Speaking” — so that what feels weird will quickly begin to feel right. Try it! Yabla lets you listen to each soundtrack as many times you need to, so you can repeat and refine ’til you get it right. No other tool allows for that level of precision — and improvement.

There’s actually a big difference between un and une. Yabla Speak will make you repeat each one until you get it right. And TBH it’s really nice to do all that in the privacy of your own space — versus in front of an entire boulangerie of people, including a cashier who can’t understand your tradition from your “tradition.” There’s no doubt that spending some time with Yabla Speak will make your next trip to Paris (or Montréal, or French Polynesia, or Morocco) that much better.

If you want to speak French like a native, there’s no better way than listening to a native speaker — and then refining your accent with Yabla Speak.

Also, it’s super fun. Try it free for 15 days!