Guides · Reading guide
Learn French by reading.
Why French spelling hides its sound and how to hear it, the literary past tense you’ll only meet in books, what to read at each level, and a routine for learning on your own.
October 24, 2026
Say il parle, “he speaks”, and then ils parlent, “they speak”, and a French listener hears the same thing twice. The s of ils is silent, and so are the e, the n and the t at the end of parlent: four letters of grammar, and you hear none of them.
French is full of this. Its spelling marks plurals, agreements and verb endings that you no longer hear in speech, which makes French one of the best languages to learn by reading and one of the riskiest to learn only by reading. On the page you see grammar your ears would miss, with no sign of how any of it sounds. Our one rule for French follows from that: read it with the sound on.
The short answer
You can learn a great deal of French by reading, but in French, far more than in Spanish, reading has to come with listening. Read stories written for your level, where you already know almost every word. Listen to the same text while you follow the words, then read it aloud. Look up only the words that block a sentence or keep coming back.
Reading shows you grammar you can’t hear in French speech, and listening teaches you sounds the spelling leaves unmarked. You need both, on the same text, from the first week.
Facing Pages · bilingual stories
Read French with English on the facing page, and hear it read aloud
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 grammar you can see
Most of the French you see but don’t hear is grammar. Say le chat and les chats aloud and only the article changes; the s on chats is for the eye. Parle, parles and parlent are three spellings of one sound. Ami and amie, a male and a female friend, sound identical; only un or une in front tells you which. In speech, the little words in front, the article and the pronoun, carry what’s left of the grammar, while on the page the nouns and verbs mark it themselves.
Some words share a sound and nothing else. Vert, verre, vers and ver, green, glass, toward and worm, are all pronounced /vɛʁ/. On the page you’d never mix them up. Aloud, only the sentence around them tells you which you heard.
Psycholinguists have measured how lopsided this is. In 1996, Johannes Ziegler, Arthur Jacobs and Gregory Stone analyzed every one-syllable word in French and found the language “relatively consistent” from spelling to sound but “highly inconsistent” from sound to spelling. Once you know the rules, you can usually say a French word you see written, but you often can’t spell one you hear, or even tell which word it was. That favors reading, on one condition: you have to learn the rules first, and you learn them by listening to texts while you read them.
Liaisons and other sounds you have to hear
Some silent letters come back. In a liaison, as the Office québécois de la langue française defines it, a final consonant that is usually mute is pronounced together with the vowel that starts the next word. Les is /le/ in les chats, but in les amis you hear its s: /lezami/, “lay-zah-mee”. Some liaisons are compulsory, between an article and its noun or a pronoun and its verb, and others are forbidden, as after et. The linking consonant can also change its sound: an s or an x links as a z, a d as a t.
French spelling marks none of this. Read ils ont, “they have”, and ils sont, “they are”, and you’ll never confuse them. Hear them at speed and the whole difference is a buzz against a hiss: /il.zɔ̃/ against /il.sɔ̃/.
You can’t work out some sounds from print at all. Neuf, nine, ends in an f sound, except before ans, heures and hommes (and sometimes autres), where the Académie française’s dictionary says the f is pronounced v. Neuf ans, nine years old, is /nœvɑ̃/.
One paragraph, read with the sound on
Le chat de Madame Dubois is an A1 story set on the Croix-Rousse, Lyon’s old silk weavers’ hill. Its opening follows, with our English beside it. Read the French silently first, then go through it again, listening in your head for the silent letters.
Tous les jours, un gros chat roux vient manger chez Léa. Il entre par le balcon et il attend son déjeuner sur la table !
Every day, a big ginger cat comes to Léa’s place to eat. He comes in from the balcony and waits for his lunch on the table!
Léa a neuf ans et elle habite à la Croix-Rousse, à Lyon. Le chat s’appelle Pompon. C’est le chat de Madame Dubois, la voisine du dessus.
Léa is nine years old and she lives in the Croix-Rousse, in Lyon. The cat’s name is Pompon. He belongs to Madame Dubois, the neighbor upstairs.
Léa donne des croquettes à Pompon dans un petit bol bleu. Après le repas, Pompon dort sur le canapé, au soleil.
Léa gives Pompon some kibble in a little blue bowl. After the meal, Pompon sleeps on the sofa, in the sun.
The first sentence has eleven words and nine final letters that make no sound: tous, les, jours, gros, chat, roux, vient, manger, chez. In the next, the t of et stays silent before il, because French speakers never make a liaison after et, and you don’t hear the d of attend either.
The two traps come in the second paragraph. Léa a neuf ans: there’s that v. And in elle habite, the h is silent, as every French h is, so you say elle and the verb as if they were one word. In the third, dans un petit bol links, /dɑ̃zœ̃/, because a one-syllable preposition takes the liaison, while the s of repas and the t of dort stay quiet.
None of this is hard once you’ve heard it a few times. In the Facing Pages app, your phone’s own voices can read every sentence aloud while the app highlights it, and you can slow the voice down in Settings. Tap a sentence, play it, say it yourself, play it again. That takes about thirty seconds a sentence, and it’s the quickest way we know to tie each spelling to its sound.
The tense you’ll only meet on paper
Pick up a French novel and you’ll run into a tense your course barely mentioned. The Office québécois de la langue française calls the passé simple the least used tense of the indicative today, practically absent from speech. Writers still use it, mainly to tell stories, in novels and in scientific and journalistic prose, and mostly in the third person.
Two of our free advanced stories show the choice a French writer makes. L’accordeur, set in Liège, tells its story in the passé simple: Lucien Delvaux posa sa mallette de cuir sur le carrelage et la regarda par-dessus ses lunettes. Le dernier bouquiniste, set on the banks of the Seine, uses the passé composé: Gaspard Lemoine a trouvé une lettre. Both are correct and both put the events in the past, but the passé simple gives you the voice of a printed story, and the passé composé sounds like someone telling you what happened.
Some writers pick the passé composé on purpose. Albert Camus told L’Étranger (1942) in it, and the linguist Denis Apothéloz counts seven passés simples doing narrative work in the whole novel. Le Petit Prince, a book many learners meet early, moves between the two: its first sentence turns on j’ai vu, and its second chapter closes with je fis la connaissance du petit prince.
Learn to recognize the passé simple, and don’t bother practicing it. Native speakers rarely say it, and a few third-person forms cover most of what you’ll read:
| Verb | In a novel | In conversation | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| être | il fut, ils furent | il a été | he was |
| avoir | il eut, ils eurent | il a eu | he had |
| faire | il fit, ils firent | il a fait | he did, he made |
| aller | il alla, ils allèrent | il est allé | he went |
| venir | il vint, ils vinrent | il est venu | he came |
| poser, and every -er verb like it | il posa, ils posèrent | il a posé | he put down |
Watch for two traps. Il dit is both “he says” and “he said”, because dire has the same form in both tenses, and so do regular -ir verbs such as finir. And il vit is either “he lives”, from vivre, or “he saw”, from voir. You tell them apart by the tenses around them. L’accordeur opens with « Il est faux », dit Inès, and the next sentence is in the imparfait, quelqu’un jouait une comptine, so dit is past, and our English says “said”.
Facing Pages · bilingual stories
Read French with English on the facing page, and hear it read aloud
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 linkWhat to read, from your first month to your first novel
Start with stories written for learners: about 300 words, in the present tense, with aller plus an infinitive for the future, and the passé composé arriving at A2. Three complete ones, from Paris, Montreal and Brittany, are on our page of French short stories for beginners. At this stage, listen to everything you read. You’re setting your pronunciation now, and setting it right costs less than fixing it later.
At B1, stories of 400 to 700 words bring the passé composé and the imparfait together, with the futur simple, the conditionnel, the small pronouns y and en, and a first subjonctif after il faut que. At this level French begins to read like French, and a matched translation starts to help. Use it to check a single sentence, and keep reading the story itself in French; our guide to parallel text explains how.
At B2 and C1, the passé simple, the full subjonctif and the plus-que-parfait arrive, and you can start on books written for French readers. For a first novel, L’Étranger has two advantages over most classics: it’s short, and its past tense is the one you already speak. Le Petit Prince is gentler in its words and good practice in spotting the passé simple.
In newer books you’ll find two spellings of some words. In 1990 the Conseil supérieur de la langue française proposed a set of spelling corrections, which the Académie française approved and the Journal officiel published on December 6, 1990. They are recommended, not required, so connaître and connaitre, événement and évènement, are all correct, and you’ll meet both.
Learning French on your own, by reading
Without a teacher, take each story through the same four steps, in this order:
- Read it silently, French first, for what happens. Look across at the English only for a sentence that won’t come clear.
- Listen to it while you follow the words. Now you hear what the spelling rules sound like: the endings that vanish, the liaisons, the silent h.
- Read it aloud yourself, a sentence at a time, and listen again to check.
- Then turn it around with a dictée: play one sentence, write it down without looking, and compare. You’re practicing the hard direction, from sound to spelling, and you’ll see which endings you didn’t hear.
Then read more than feels necessary, and reread. In 2008, Ronan Brown, Rob Waring and Sangrawee Donkaewbua compared reading, reading while listening and listening alone. Learners picked up new words all three ways, but they failed to learn most of the words, and the words the text repeated were the likeliest to stick. Three months later, tested without prompts, learners kept on average about one of the 28 target words from either reading mode and none from listening alone. You learn little from one pass through a story, and far more from many passes through stories that share their words. Rereading gives you those passes, and so do series: Facing Pages has twelve French series told in episodes, and the first episode of each is free.
Listen to each French story you read, starting with the first one, and you won’t have to unlearn pronunciations you guessed from the spelling.
Questions
Can you learn French just by reading?
You can build a large vocabulary, a solid feel for the grammar and real reading fluency mostly by reading. But French spelling hides so much of the sound that if you only read, you won’t be able to follow speech. Listen as well as read from the start, and use the same text for both when you can.
Can you learn French on your own?
For reading and listening, yes: choose stories at your level, read them, listen to them, read them aloud, and reread. Speaking and following fast conversation take practice with people, but a reading habit gives you the words and grammar to bring to it.
Why does French have so many silent letters?
Mostly because French spelling kept letters after speakers stopped pronouncing them. Many still come back: in liaison (les amis), and in related words, as you hear the silent t of petit in petite. Some vanished from both: the circumflex in forêt and hôpital marks an s that survives in forestier, hospitalier, and English “forest” and “hospital”.
Do I need to learn the passé simple?
You need to recognize it, and you can skip learning to use it. It is practically absent from spoken French and appears mostly in the third person in written narration, so a handful of forms such as il fut, il eut, il fit and il alla will carry you through most novels.
What French books should a beginner read?
Start with short stories written for learners at A1 and A2, around 300 words, with a translation matched sentence by sentence and audio of the same text. Leave novels written for French readers until about B2.
Does reading French help with speaking?
It does, by a roundabout route. Reading gives you the words and structures you’ll need, and reading aloud after listening trains your mouth on real sentences. You still need conversations to learn to speak, and you’ll go into them with more to say.
Is there an app that teaches French through reading?
Yes, several, and we make one of them, Facing Pages, so weigh our answer with that in mind. For French in particular, look for stories at your level, a translation matched sentence by sentence, word lookups that give the meaning in that sentence, and audio of the same text, because in French you have to hear a text as well as read it.
Facing Pages · bilingual stories
Read French with English on the facing page, and hear it read aloud
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