French 4: Your First 150 Words

A hundred and fifty words will not let you read a novel. They will let you say who you are, ask for what you want, count, name the day, and understand the small words that hold every sentence together. They are also enough to prove to yourself that remembering a language is a skill with a method, not a gift.

This piece is a deck: 150 French words on cards, each with an example sentence, scheduled by a spaced-repetition algorithm so that every word comes back just before you would forget it. It explains how the deck was chosen, how the schedule works, and how to use it in ten minutes a day. Your progress is saved in your browser, shared with the trainers in the other French pieces, and can be exported.

Your device has no French voice, so the play buttons are hidden.

What is in the deck

The deck holds 150 words. They were chosen by judgement and checked against a published frequency list built from film and television subtitles (Lexique 3.83): 127 of the 150 are among its 1,000 most frequent entries (counting a verb under its infinitive), 139 among the first 2,000, and the rest are survival words such as the numbers and the weekdays. They are not the 150 most frequent words in order; they are the 150 you need to start saying things.

Group	Words	A few of them
Pronouns	8	je, tu, il, elle, on
Little words	34	le, la, les, des, du, de la, et, ou
Question words	7	qui, qu’est-ce que, où, quand, comment
Verbs	23	être, avoir, aller, faire, pouvoir
Numbers 0 to 20	21	zéro, un, une, deux, trois, quatre
Days of the week	7	le lundi, le mardi, le mercredi, le jeudi, le vendredi
Nouns	33	la maison, l’eau (f.), le pain, le café, le jour
Adjectives	17	bon, bonne, mauvais, mauvaise, grand, grande, petit, petite, nouveau, nouvelle

Notice what comes first: the small words and the verbs. In real speech, words like de, le, être and avoir appear constantly, far more than any noun. That is the frequency idea from the first method piece, in practice: the words that appear most do the most work.

Each word becomes two cards

Each card has the French, the English and an example sentence. Each word becomes two cards: French to English first, then, once you have passed that, English to French, which is harder and builds recall. The first direction is recognising; the second is producing, and producing is what you need when you speak.

Every noun comes with its article, so you learn la maison and le pain, never maison or pain alone. When the article is l’, which hides the gender, the card adds it: l’eau (f.), l’homme (m.). Endings help less in French than in Spanish: le livre, le musée and le problème are masculine although they end in e. Learning the article with the noun from the first day is far easier than trying to recover the gender later.

How the schedule works

The scheduler is a simplified SM-2, the algorithm behind many flashcard apps. See the card, try to recall, reveal, and grade yourself honestly: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. A first success returns after 1 day, then 3 days, then the gap is multiplied by an ease factor that starts at 2.5; Hard lowers it and Easy raises it. Again sends the card back four cards later. The buttons show the next gap.

Here is what a card looks like if you press Good every time it returns:

Time it appears	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th
Next gap, in days	1	3	8	20	50	125

Six good recalls take a word from today to a gap of about four months. Press Again once on the way and the card returns the same session, drops its ease a little, and starts the climb over with shorter steps. That is the whole mechanism: the effort goes where forgetting is closest, and you stop spending minutes on words you already know.

Using the deck well

• Say the answer first. Out loud, or in your head, before you press Show answer. Looking is not recalling.
• Say the article too. If the card says la maison and you said maison, that is a Hard, not a Good.
• Grade honestly. If you hesitated or guessed, press Hard or Again. A flattering grade pushes the card too far away and you will pay for it later.
• Read the example. The sentence shows how the word behaves. Say it aloud; play it if you have a voice.
• Do the reviews first, and keep it small. Ten new cards a day is a good rate. If the deck feels heavy, drop to five.

Making the words stick

The deck does the scheduling. Three small habits do the rest.

Use what English gives you. English took thousands of words from French after 1066, so a large share of French vocabulary looks familiar: important, la famille, la question, le restaurant. Treat these as free, but say them the French way. Watch for false friends: une librairie is a bookshop (a library is une bibliothèque); actuellement means currently, not actually; rester means to stay; blesser means to injure; sensible means sensitive. When a card looks too easy, check the example sentence.

Attach a word to something real. Say la porte when you open your door, l’eau when you pour a glass. Naming things in your own life gives the word a second route back into memory.

Meet the words again outside the deck. A word you have only seen on a card is fragile. Listen for the small words in any French audio, even if you understand little; the next time a card comes up, you will already know the sound of it.

Saving and moving your progress

The deck saves to your browser on this device, in a record shared with the trainers in the other French pieces. Clearing your browser data erases it, and a private window forgets everything when you close it. Export gives you a code to paste into a note; import restores it on this or another device.

Your first two weeks

Ten to twenty minutes a day, in this order: review the cards that are due, do one drill, then read or listen to something short. This table pulls the four French pieces together.

Days	Deck	Drill	Outside the page
1 to 2	10 new cards a day	Pronounce it: every chip. Silent or sounded: 15 words.	Read the vowel table aloud.
3 to 5	10 new, plus reviews	Trainer: -er verbs; je, tu, il.	Say your name, where you live and what you do, out loud.
6 to 9	Reviews first, then 10 new	Trainer: add -ir and -re, then the big four. Liaison set once.	Five minutes of beginner listening.
10 to 12	Reviews, then new	Trainer: modal verbs and other irregulars. Article sorter once.	Write five true sentences with être, avoir, aller, faire, vouloir.
13 to 14	Reviews only if you are behind	Trainer: everything you have.	Take the quizzes. Export your progress.

Where to go next

• 🌐 Lessons with video. TV5MONDE: Apprendre le français, free exercises built on real television clips, sorted by level from A1.
• 🌐 Listening from scratch. Language Transfer has a free audio course for French, built around working the language out yourself.
• 🌐 Easy news. Radio France Internationale publishes a short daily news bulletin read slowly in simpler French, Journal en français facile, with transcripts.
• 🌐 A dictionary. Larousse French–English, free online, with the gender of every noun.
• 📘 A frequency dictionary. Deryle Lonsdale and Yvon Le Bras, A Frequency Dictionary of French: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Routledge, 2009), the 5,000 most frequent words with example sentences.
• 📘 Graded readers. Short books for A1 and A2 learners, from publishers such as CLE International and Hachette, once you finish the deck.
• 🗣 A person. A paid tutor or a language-exchange partner, one session a week, as soon as you can say twenty sentences. No app replaces talking to someone.

What sticks

• The 150 words are the ones you need to start saying things: small words and verbs first.
• Each word is two cards: French to English, then English to French, which builds recall.
• Every noun is learned with its article; l’ hides the gender, so the card adds (m.) or (f.).
• The scheduler widens the gap after each success (1, 3, 8, 20 days and so on) and sends a miss back sooner.
• Say the answer before you look, grade honestly, and do the reviews before the new cards.
• Many French words look English; a few false friends do not mean what they seem.