It can be hard to find the best intermediate French lessons.
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.