French vocabulary follows the same brutal distribution as every other language. A tiny set of words does most of the work; everything else is a long, thin tail.
The hundred below account for roughly half of the words in ordinary spoken French. Learn them and the language stops looking like an undifferentiated stream and starts having visible joints.
English speakers get an unusual bonus here. Centuries of Norman French left tens of thousands of shared words, so beyond this list your vocabulary grows faster in French than in almost any other language.
The connectors
The words holding every French sentence together. Learn these first.
- le / la / les — the. Masculine, feminine, plural
- de — of, from. Contracts: de + le = du, de + les = des
- un / une — a, an
- et — and
- à — to, at. Contracts: à + le = au, à + les = aux
- en — in, to, some
- que — that, which
- qui — who, which
- ne ... pas — not. Negation wraps around the verb
- dans — in
- pour — for
- sur — on
- avec — with
- par — by, through
- mais — but
- ou / où — or / where. The accent is the only difference
- si — if, so, yes. The "yes" sense contradicts a negative
- comme — like, as
- plus / moins — more / less
The verbs that carry everything
All irregular, all unavoidable.
- être — to be. Also an auxiliary for movement verbs
- avoir — to have. The main auxiliary: j’ai mangé
- faire — to do, to make. Turns up in enormous numbers of expressions
- aller — to go. Forms the near future: je vais manger
- pouvoir — to be able, can
- vouloir — to want
- devoir — must, to have to
- savoir — to know. Facts and skills
- connaître — to know. People and places
- dire — to say
- voir — to see
- prendre — to take
- venir — to come
- mettre — to put
- donner — to give
- trouver — to find
- parler — to speak
- passer — to pass, to spend (time)
- penser — to think
- croire — to believe
People and pointing
- je / tu / vous — I / you (informal) / you (formal or plural)
- il / elle — he / she
- nous — we. Often replaced by on in speech
- on — one, we. Extremely common — usually means "we" in conversation
- ils / elles — they
- me / te / se / lui / leur — object pronouns
- mon / ton / son — my / your / his-her
- ce / cet / cette — this, that
- tout / tous — all, every
- autre — other
- même — same, even
- quelque — some
- rien / personne — nothing / nobody
- chaque — each
Time, place and degree
- quand — when
- maintenant — now
- déjà — already
- toujours — always, still
- jamais — never
- encore — again, still, yet
- aujourd’hui — today
- hier / demain — yesterday / tomorrow
- temps — time, weather
- jour / année / fois — day / year / time (occurrence)
- ici / là — here / there
- très — very
- bien — well
- beaucoup — a lot
- peu — little, few
- aussi — also
- alors — then, so
- après / avant — after / before
- sans — without
- sous — under
- entre — between
- depuis — since, for
- pendant — during
- trop — too much
The nouns that keep recurring
- chose — thing
- homme / femme — man / woman
- vie — life
- monde — world. Also "people": il y a du monde
- pays — country
- maison — house
- travail — work
- personne / gens — person / people
- enfant — child
- main — hand
- œil / yeux — eye / eyes. Irregular plural
- eau — water
- part — part, share
- point — point
- côté — side
- raison — reason. avoir raison = to be right
What a frequency list will not do
Covering half the words on a page is not the same as understanding half of what is on it. The half you are missing carries most of the meaning: articles, prepositions and pronouns are structure, and structure is not content.
A frequency list hands you the scaffolding. It does not hand you the building, and the building is what you came for.
Two further limits. Frequency depends entirely on the corpus: a list built from film subtitles looks different from one built from newspapers, so pick the one matching what you want to consume. And your own priorities outrank any general list. If you are learning French for work, the vocabulary of your field beats half of this.
One French-specific caveat. Spoken French elides and contracts heavily, so a word you know perfectly on the page may be unrecognisable in speech, je ne sais pas routinely comes out closer to chais pas. Learning these words from audio rather than text is worth the extra effort.
How to actually learn them
A frequency list is a syllabus, not a method.
- Learn them in sentences, never alone. Function words mean almost nothing in isolation. Learn them inside a phrase and let the pattern do the teaching.
- Fifteen a week, not a hundred at once. A hundred words crammed on Sunday are a hundred words gone by Wednesday.
- Cover the English and produce the word. Reading down a list feels like studying and mostly is not. Make yourself retrieve it.
- Get to real material fast. The list exists so that real French becomes partly comprehensible. Once it is, the input teaches you faster than any list can.
You can look any of these up with pronunciation and usage examples in our dictionary, and our learning paths introduce them roughly in this order rather than alphabetically.
Learn the hundred, then go and read something written for French people.
