Guides · Reading guide
What a French reading app should do.
Why French needs audio of every sentence, lookups that know the passé simple and Belgian, Swiss and Quebec words, which voices you’ll hear, and what’s free.
November 3, 2026
At noon, in a primary school in Liège, a piano tuner leaves the school’s piano half tuned and tells the teacher On va dîner. He means lunch. In Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec, dîner is the midday meal, the word the Office québécois de la langue française records as the one to use there; in France, lunch is generally déjeuner, and dîner comes in the evening.
The scene is from L’accordeur, one of the free stories in our French library, and it holds most of what makes French hard to learn from the page. The word means a different meal across a border. Its r is silent. And the sentence before it, À midi, ils laissèrent le piano à moitié accordé, is in a past tense French keeps for writing, with an ending, -èrent, whose last three letters make no sound. A meaning that moves with the map, letters you never say, a tense almost nobody speaks. An app for reading French has to handle all three. We make Facing Pages, so read our view as an interested one; this guide shows how it handles each, in stories you can open free.
The short answer
For French, choose a reading app that lets you hear every sentence, not only read it. French spelling hides much of its sound, so audio of the same text, a sentence at a time, matters more than in most languages you could learn by reading. Then check that word lookups give the meaning in that sentence and the dictionary form, because a literary past like laissèrent means little until you see laisser; that the levels tell you when that tense arrives; and that the French comes from more than one place.
Under all that, the basics: stories at your level, a translation matched sentence by sentence, and enough free to read for a week before you pay.
Facing Pages · bilingual stories
Hear every French sentence, with English on the facing page
228 original stories in Spanish, French and English, with your own language on the facing page, matched sentence by sentence. The first episode of every series is free, and there’s no account to make.
Reading this on a computer?
Scan the code with your phone’s camera. It opens the App Store or Google Play, whichever your phone uses. No account needed.
Or text yourself the linkSound first, because the page hides it
In La nouvelle maison, a beginner series set in Nantes, the first episode tells you Nour a dix ans, et son petit frère Adam a six ans. Read it and you’ve learned two ages. Hear it and you learn what the page doesn’t show: the x of dix comes out as a z, “dee-zahn,” because ans begins with a vowel, and six ans does the same. The Académie française’s dictionary says the x of dix sounds like ss when the word stands alone, like z before a noun that starts with a vowel, and not at all before a consonant. Three sentences later, the same story writes un vieil immeuble, an old building, and soon after, un vieux monsieur, an old man. Here, for once, the spelling moves with the sound: vieux becomes vieil before a vowel so the two words can run together, which only makes sense once you’ve heard it.
Our guide to learning French by reading goes through how much of French grammar sits in letters you never hear, and the liaisons nothing on the page marks. For choosing an app, it comes down to three questions. Can you play the sentence you’re reading, on its own, as often as you like? Does a highlight follow the voice, so your eye ties each sound to its spelling? Can you slow it down?
In Facing Pages the answer is yes, three times. Tap a sentence and play just that one, or press Listen and the app reads on through the story, highlighting each sentence as it’s spoken. A reading-speed slider in Settings slows the voice down or speeds it up. The voices are your phone’s own: synthetic, not actors, and they run on the phone without a connection. They also never listen back. Facing Pages can’t tell you how your French sounds; for that, read each sentence aloud after the voice and compare. In French, the play button is half the app.
The past tense you’ll only read
Back in Liège, laissèrent is a passé simple. You won’t hear it in conversation, and many of its forms look like nothing in a beginner’s verb tables, which is why a lookup has to give you the dictionary form as well as the meaning. Tap laissèrent in Facing Pages and you get “left,” with laisser beside it.
The same story shows why the meaning has to come from the sentence. On the first page, Lucien posa sa mallette de cuir sur le carrelage: set his leather case down on the tiles. Three paragraphs on, il posait beaucoup de questions: he asked a lot of questions. And once the piano is finally in tune, twenty children’s voices se posèrent sur le piano comme des oiseaux sur une branche, settled on the piano like birds on a branch. One verb, poser, three meanings, two tenses. The app answers “set down,” “asked” and “settled,” each with its dictionary form, because every word of every French story in the library has its meaning in that story, and a sentence where a word changes meaning gets an entry of its own.
There’s research behind putting the meaning right where you need it. In 1996, Jan Hulstijn, Merel Hollander and Tine Greidanus gave advanced Dutch students of French a French short story to read, some with translations of unknown words in the margin, some with a bilingual dictionary, some with neither, and then tested them on 16 words that had appeared once or three times. Meeting a word three times did more good when the reader had its meaning to hand, in the margin or the dictionary, than when they didn’t. Left to themselves, the authors argued, readers often skip unknown words or guess them wrong. A tap on a word is a margin note you ask for.
Levels should tell you when this tense is coming. In our French library it waits for the advanced stories, B2 and C1, and appears only in narration. Beginner stories stay in the present, with aller plus an infinitive for the future and, at A2, the passé composé; B1 brings the imparfait, the futur simple and a first subjonctif after il faut que. Not every advanced story uses the passé simple, either. Le dernier bouquiniste, set by the Seine, tells its story in the passé composé, the past you’d use yourself.
French from more than one place
Lucien’s dîner is one of several words the app labels by place. Tap it and you get “to have lunch (Belgium).” His goodbye, À tantôt, comes back as “later today (Belgium).” In L’horloger, a free C1 story set in Le Locle, in the Swiss Jura, a clock is vieille de deux cent septante ans, and septante comes back as “seventy (Swiss).” Our stories from Montreal and Quebec City do the same for Quebec words, which our guide to Quebec French vs France French takes apart.
The library’s French stories are set in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Senegal, Réunion and French Polynesia. The voices follow only part of that map, and you should know where. Stories set in Canada ask your phone for a Canadian French voice: among the free ones, Il neige à Montréal at A1 and Quatre saisons à Québec 1 at C1. Every other story asks for a voice from France, Liège, Le Locle and Dakar included, so Lucien says À tantôt in an accent from France. You’ll read Belgian and Swiss French in these stories; you won’t hear their accents.
Facing Pages · bilingual stories
Hear every French sentence, with English on the facing page
228 original stories in Spanish, French and English, with your own language on the facing page, matched sentence by sentence. The first episode of every series is free, and there’s no account to make.
Reading this on a computer?
Scan the code with your phone’s camera. It opens the App Store or Google Play, whichever your phone uses. No account needed.
Or text yourself the linkThe rest of the checklist
Everything above is particular to French. The rest is what any app for learning by reading should get right, and here is how Facing Pages does each.
| What to check | In Facing Pages |
|---|---|
| Stories at your level | 72 French stories, each with a CEFR level: 30 for beginners (A1–A2, 150 to 300 words), 21 intermediate (B1, 400 to 700) and 21 advanced (B2–C1, 900 to 1,500). Every story shows its level and a reading time. |
| A translation matched sentence by sentence | Our own English, one sentence for each French sentence, in the same order: 4,105 pairs. Tap a sentence and its partner lights up. About 20 other languages are translated on your phone instead, by Apple on iPhone and iPad and by Google’s ML Kit on Android. |
| Saving words | Save Word keeps the word, its meaning, its dictionary form, the sentence and the story, in a list called My Words, on your phone. |
| Enough free to decide | 21 French stories free in full, from A1 to C1, including the first episode of all 12 French series. Facing Pages Premium, $5.99 a month, opens the rest. |
| Privacy | No account, no ads, no tracking. |
| Offline | The free stories come with the app; with Premium, the first paid French story you open brings the rest to your phone. The voices are the phone’s, and other languages translate offline once downloaded. |
| Where you read | iPhone Duo, where a story opens like a book across the fold; any iPhone, with the translation sliding up for the sentence you tap; iPad, as a two-page spread; and Android, where foldables split the pages along the fold. |
Start where the free shelf starts. Sam à Paris 1 and Il neige à Montréal are both A1, one read in a voice from France and one in a voice from Canada, and both are complete, with our English, on our page of French short stories for beginners. Read one with the sound on. Then read it again with the sound off. If you can still hear it, the app has done its job.
Questions
What is the best free app to learn French?
We make Facing Pages, so we can only describe ours: free to download, with no ads and no account, and 21 French stories free in full from A1 to C1, each with our English matched sentence by sentence and read aloud. Facing Pages Premium, $5.99 a month, opens the rest. Whatever you try, make sure the free part lets you hear the French, not only read it.
What is the best app to learn Canadian French?
For reading, look for stories set in Quebec, Quebec words explained where they appear, and a Canadian voice. Facing Pages has stories set in Montreal, Quebec City and on the Île d’Orléans, read with a Canadian French voice, two of them free. Most of its French library is set elsewhere, from Paris to Dakar.
Can you learn French by reading books?
Yes, if you can hear what you read. Reading builds vocabulary and a feel for the grammar, but French spelling hides so much of the sound that reading alone leaves you unable to follow speech. Start with stories written for learners, with audio of the same text, and move to novels for French readers from about B2.
Is French hard to read?
Easier to read than to hear. Once you know the rules, the spelling usually tells you how a word sounds, while the sound often can’t tell you how a word is spelled, or which word it was. That makes reading a good way into French, as long as you listen to what you read.
Is there an app for French pronunciation?
Facing Pages reads every sentence aloud with your phone’s own voices, highlights it as it goes and lets you slow it down, so you can listen, repeat and listen again. It doesn’t listen to you or grade your pronunciation; for that you need a teacher or a recording of yourself.
How can I improve my French reading skills?
Read a lot of French that’s easy for you, where you know nearly every word; listen to the same text; look up only the words that block a sentence or keep coming back; and reread stories you liked. Series help, because the same words return episode after episode.
Facing Pages · bilingual stories
Hear every French sentence, with English on the facing page
228 original stories in Spanish, French and English, with your own language on the facing page, matched sentence by sentence. The first episode of every series is free, and there’s no account to make.
Reading this on a computer?
Scan the code with your phone’s camera. It opens the App Store or Google Play, whichever your phone uses. No account needed.
Or text yourself the link