Learning vocabulary is the single most time consuming, most difficult and most tedious part of learning a new language. However, it is the single most important.

That’s why we’ve put together our 5 top hacks for learning French vocabulary.

1. Learn the right words

Learning the right words is just as important as how you learn them. In fact, some words are much much more important than others.

These words are the ones that appear most frequently in French texts.

Take a look at the graph below. It shows that by learning just the 2000 most frequent words you will be able to understand 80% of any text. But for less frequent words (rank 2000+) each one makes very little difference.

That’s why it is vital to target the high frequency words first.

You can find a list of the most frequent words here or have sublingual insert them right into webpages as you browse.

2. Stick it everywhere

Research has shown that you need to see or hear a word around 160 times before it is committed to your long term memory. It’s hard to get this amount of practice in, but with a pen and a pack of post-its you can get there faster than you think. Write down the word your trying to learn and stick it everywhere (and we mean everywhere). Here are some ideas:

Computer at work

TV

Bedroom ceiling

Doors

Kitchen cupboards

Bathroom mirror

Inside your shoes (okay, maybe not).

This will take you a long way to getting those 160 times boxed off.

3. Sublingual

Post-its are one way to ensure you see each word 160 times, but the chances are that in this day and age you spend more time browsing the web than you do staring at the bathroom mirror.

Sublingual inserts French words and phrases into every single webpage you visit, offering up the original on hover. It tracks your ability and automatically selects the words you need to practice the most, effortlessly teaching you vocabulary as you browse.

Try sublingual out for free

4. Create French words from English

If you are just starting out, you may think you do not know any French at all, but that is not the case. English and French have grown up together, been created from the same ancient languages and have mixed together over their complex history. In fact they have a 27 % lexical similarity score (a measure of how much they overlap), which means if we are smart, we can steal words from English and create 1000’s of French words in an instant.

Take a look at the table below some examples of how this works. You can also find more in this booklet.

5. Flashcards

I couldn’t end this post without a mention for flashcards. Flashcards have been about since the dawn of time and although they may not be the most exciting way to work on your vocab, they work.

Try and combine them with the other tips mentioned in this article, especially focusing on the right words.

Here are your options on flashcards: