Lesson 1 is free
Audio French course for English speakers
21 minutes a day of real conversations. You hear a question, you answer out loud in the pause, and each word comes back at the moment you are about to forget it. No screen and no textbook. You only need your ears and your voice.
Bonjour, est-ce que vous parlez anglais ?Hello, do you speak English?
Non, je ne parle pas anglais. Est-ce que vous parlez français ?No, I don't speak English. Do you speak French?
Oui, je parle un peu français.Yes, I speak a little French.
This is how Lesson 1 opens. By the end of it, you can say every line yourself.
Try one minute
This is the start of Lesson 1, unedited. Press play and treat it as the real thing.
Then do what the narrator asks. Headphones help, but a phone speaker is fine.
Inside a lesson
Every lesson opens with two people talking in a place you can hear: an airport, a bus station, a taxi. You won't understand it all yet. That's the point.
Lesson 2: Pierre meets Caroline at the bus station.New words are split into sounds you can say, then put back together, until the whole sentence comes out at natural speed.
fran… çais… français.The narrator asks you for the French and leaves a pause, longer for longer sentences. You try, then a French voice gives the answer. Getting it wrong first still helps you remember.
"How do you say: Hello?" … Bonjour.Why it works
Speaxo follows the principles the linguist Paul Pimsleur drew from memory research in the 1960s, and what cognitive science has confirmed since.
In 1967 Pimsleur published a schedule for bringing a word back just before it fades: each gap about five times longer than the last. Speaxo recalls new words seconds later, then minutes later, at the end of the lesson, and again in the lessons that follow.
Time axis is logarithmic. Source: P. Pimsleur, "A Memory Schedule", The Modern Language Journal 51(2), 1967.
Pulling an answer out of memory strengthens it far more than hearing it again. That is why every prompt comes with a pause before the answer.
In the lesson: "How do you say…?", a pause, then the answer.
Roediger & Karpicke, "Test-enhanced learning", Psychological Science, 2006.Words you produce aloud are remembered better than words you only read or hear. Each pause is there for your voice, not for silence.
In the lesson: you speak dozens of times in one lesson.
MacLeod et al., "The production effect", J. Exp. Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2010.We remember better when a word is tied to a situation. Each lesson is set in a scene you hear around you, with its announcements, engines and crowds.
In the lesson: the airport ding before "Bonjour".
Godden & Baddeley, "Context-dependent memory", British Journal of Psychology, 1975. Barsalou, "Grounded cognition", Annual Review of Psychology, 2008.Each lesson adds only a handful of high-frequency words, then recombines them into new sentences. By Lesson 2 you build an eight-word sentence from scratch.
In the lesson: 14 new words in Lesson 1, 5 in Lesson 2.
Spacing beats cramming: Cepeda et al., "Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks", Psychological Bulletin, 2006.Why French
French is spoken by about 396 million people. It is an official language of the United Nations, the European Union and the Olympic Games, and the second most studied foreign language in the world after English.
Each new count finds more French speakers, mostly in Africa, where seven in ten could live by 2070.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French was the language of England's court and law for some three centuries. More than a quarter of the words in an English dictionary come from it.
RSVP? Répondez s'il vous plaît: please reply.
28% of the 75,000 words in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary: Finkenstaedt & Wolff, Ordered Profusion, 1973.
Where you'll get to
One lesson a day takes you through a level in two weeks. Each level ends with a real conversation you can hold on your own.
Say hello and goodbye, introduce yourself, say which languages you speak and understand, ask someone how they are, say thank you and order a coffee or a glass of wine.
Aims at CEFR A1.
Ask where things are and when they open, count and pay in euros, book a hotel room, take a taxi or a train, and understand the answers you get.
Aims at CEFR A1+.
Talk about your family, your work and your plans, say what you like, and tell what you did yesterday and will do tomorrow.
Aims at CEFR A2.
Keep a conversation going at natural speed, give your opinion, sort out a problem when travelling and tell a short story.
Aims at CEFR A2 to B1.
Questions
Yes. You get the full lesson as an MP3, yours to keep. Lessons 2 onwards come in paid levels, and people on the list hear about them first.
None. Lesson 1 starts from "Bonjour". If you already know a little, it goes quickly and the drills sharpen your accent.
It is one of the closest languages to English. The US Foreign Service Institute puts it in its group of languages that are quickest for English speakers to learn, and thousands of its words already look familiar.
That's how it's designed. Everything happens by ear, so you can drive, walk or cook while you learn. Just make sure you can speak out loud.
One lesson a day. One lesson a day works better than seven on a Sunday, because the spacing between sessions is part of how memory works. If a lesson felt hard, do it again the next day.
An English narrator guides you, and French voices act out the conversations. The voices are generated with AI, then directed and checked line by line for natural French pronunciation and pacing.
Put in your email and Lesson 1 lands in your inbox, ready for your next commute.