Trilingue

Trilingue is a free French course for adults who already speak English and Spanish. Twenty lessons take you from your first French sounds to the core of A1, and every word you learn joins a spaced-repetition review deck. It runs in your browser in English or Spanish, with no account.

The Method

Trilingue teaches French to people who already speak English and Spanish — and treats that as a superpower, not a distraction. Every lesson is built on three evidence-backed techniques:

• Comprehensible input first. New sounds and words are introduced in context, at a level just above what you already know, before any grammar rule is named.
• Retrieval practice. Multiple-choice recognition only gets you in the door. The core exercise is typing the French from memory — recall is what makes vocabulary stick, not rereading.
• Spaced repetition (SM-2). Every item you learn becomes a flashcard scheduled by the same algorithm behind Anki and SuperMemo. Cards you find easy drift weeks apart; cards you struggle with come back tomorrow.

Speaking English and Spanish already gives you a head start most French learners don't have. French shares a huge Latin vocabulary layer with Spanish (-tion ↔ -ción, -ment ↔ -mente, -eux ↔ -oso), so hundreds of words are recognizable on sight. Spanish also already trained your brain to think in grammatical gender, verb conjugation tables, and formal/informal address (tú/usted ↔ tu/vous) — concepts that trip up English-only learners for months. Trilingue surfaces these transfer bridges constantly, and just as importantly, flags the false friends and gender-mismatch traps where the resemblance lies to you (actuellement ≠ actually, la mer is feminine even though el mar is masculine).

Level 1

Ten lessons take you from zero to true beginner (A0 → A1): the sounds of French and why they're a bigger leap from Spanish than they look, greetings and the tu/vous distinction, subject pronouns and être, avoir with articles and gender, regular -er verbs, numbers through 99 (including the notorious vigesimal 70/80/90 system), basic negation, the verbs aller/faire/venir, and a final set of survival phrases with your first shadowing exercise. Every lesson pairs a short comprehensible-input passage with interleaved practice: recognition, typed recall, listening, and gender drills.

Level 2

Ten more lessons carry you through the A1 core: family vocabulary with possessive adjectives, food and the partitive article, adjective agreement and placement, days/months/telling time, daily routines with reflexive verbs, the home and prepositions of place (including the untranslatable chez), the modal trio vouloir/pouvoir/devoir, the -ir and -re verb families, and finally the passé composé — first with avoir, then the être verbs and reflexives — so you can tell someone what you did last weekend. As always, every lesson leans on what Spanish and English already gave you for free.

How to use it

1. On the home screen, start Lesson 1. Each lesson opens with a short explanation and the new words, each with audio, an example sentence and, where useful, notes on how it relates to English and Spanish.
2. Start the practice: recognition, typed recall, listening and gender exercises, mixed together.
3. Come back to Review each day. Rate each card Again, Hard, Good or Easy, and the scheduler decides when you see it next. The home screen shows how many cards are due and your streak.
4. Use Resources for curated French films, series, music, podcasts and games to practise alongside the lessons.
5. In Settings, choose the voice and speech rate, decide whether accent mistakes count as wrong, and back up or sync your progress.

Technical Notes

Audio uses your browser's built-in French text-to-speech voice, with an adjustable playback rate — no downloads, no accounts. Every item also links out to Forvo for a native speaker's recording. Your progress, streak, and spaced-repetition schedule are stored entirely in your browser; nothing is sent to a server. Use the export/import feature in Settings to back up your progress, or connect Google Drive or OneDrive in Settings to sync it automatically across your devices — the data goes only to your own cloud storage account.