Best Podcasts to Learn French Online

When my oldest daughter decided to take French as a foreign language in her High School homeschooling program, we naturally purchased a French curriculum to help her learn the French Language. However, as someone who has learned several foreign languages fluently, I knew that a simple French curriculum alone would not get her to fluency in the French language. Instead, we needed to find additional streams of learning for her to master the French Language.

Thankfully, with the internet, many wonderful free resources can help you either learn a language or supplement your foreign language learning adventures. Free podcasts are the best and easiest way we've found to master the French language. There are many free podcasts for learning French by podcast available in the iTunes podcast directory, and I'm going to tell you about our favorites below, too.

First, what is a podcast? A podcast is like a blog, but with audio or video files. You can subscribe to their rss feed and manually download each edition when it comes out, or you can subscribe to a podcast using iTunes, which I talk about more in my other Hub, My Favorite Podcasts for Home Business Tips. There's even a couple of videos on there to show you how to subscribe, if you've never done that before!

Before we talk about what podcasts work best for learning French by podcast, let's first talk about how to best learn French or any foreign language. I have learned both French (6 years of formal study) and German (2 years of formal study but many more years living in a German speaking area) and I consider myself fluent in German, despite not studying German as long as I studied French. Why is that? Because I used my German skills in real life situations!

If you want to successfully learn French, you will need to use what you learn, or you will lose all of that French you memorize.

1. Start with some kind of a French text book. Text books and French curricula aren't always the most exciting ways of learning a foreign language, but a French curriculum can give you a good foundation for learning the basics, especially the grammar rules. I like the le Francais Facile curriculum, from Great Commission Languages (see the photo to the right). This is what my daughter uses, with great success.
   
2. Learn French words that are meaningful to you. We find that using removable stickers (like the kind you use for Garage sales) with French vocabulary written on them, then sticking them on different items around the house are a huge help. For example, we have the French word for Refrigerator stuck on our fridge so that we can practice that word whenever we open the fridge door.
3. Watch a familiar movie in French. Thank God for DVDs. Many DVDs have language options in the special features section. Click on Special Features, and look through the language options to see if French (or whatever foreign language you are learning) is available for that movie. Even if you don't understand every word spoken, you will be training your ear to listen to the French language being spoken in a natural way, and you will eventually improve your understanding.