Learn French to conversational in six months
Six months of daily practice — about 30 minutes a day on free input plus a few paid tutor calls a month — gets a determined adult to real, halting conversations. Roughly 180 hours total. You will not be fluent. You will be able to talk.
6 months · ~180 hours · hold a 15-minute conversation with a patient native speaker
1.Language Transfer — Introduction to French
Forty audio lessons that build the spine of French grammar from English cognates and pure logic — no flashcards, no rote. Mihalis Eleftheriou teaches an unseen student in real time and you answer alongside her. The course is shorter than the Spanish one, but by the end you can produce sentences in present, past and future and you understand why the words go where they go. There is no better free first 25 hours in French.
Free (donation-supported)
Language Transfer French →2.Coffee Break French + Easy French
Coffee Break French Season 1 is forty 15-minute podcast episodes that take an absolute beginner through the patterns of everyday speech. Pair it with the Easy French YouTube channel — street interviews with French and English subtitles — for ear training in the language as it's actually spoken in Paris and Lyon. Listen during your commute, dishes, walks. The hours add up faster than you expect.
Free; optional Coffee Break Academy add-on $9/month
Coffee Break French →3.italki — community tutor
Once you can follow a slow French podcast without panic, book a community tutor for 30-minute conversation lessons. Community tutors are native speakers without formal credentials — exactly what you want, and why they cost $8–15 an hour instead of $30. Tell them you're a beginner who only wants to talk. Book the same tutor twice a week so they learn your weak spots and stop being polite about them.
~$8–15/hour, pay per lesson
italki French tutors →If this doesn't fit you
If you need French for an upcoming trip and have weeks, not months, replace steps 1 and 2 with Pimsleur French ($21/month). It drills survival phrases into your mouth fast and ignores grammar. You'll arrive able to order food, ask directions and apologize. You will not be conversational and you'll forget most of it within a year.
Why this path
Most beginners default to Duolingo and a year later still can't order coffee without freezing. The bottleneck is never vocabulary — it's input hours and mouth time. Language Transfer hands you the grammar skeleton in three weeks; Coffee Break and Easy French pile up the listening hours your brain actually needs; italki forces production before perfectionism kills it. Skipping the tutor is the most common mistake. Book the first lesson at month four whether you feel ready or not.