French flashcards: every price, and the deck problem nobody names

You download the deck. Card 1 is bonjour. Card 2 is merci. By card 40 you're still tapping Good on words you've known since high school, and the word you actually fumbled in Tuesday's lesson, the one where you reached for "I would have gone" and produced something your tutor had to repair, is nowhere in the deck at all.

That's the deal every pre-made French deck makes with you. It was ordered by frequency for a learner who is the average of everybody, and you are not that person.

Frequency ordering is genuinely the right sequence for somebody starting at zero. It stops being right the moment you have a history with the language, which is roughly week 3.

The deck is built for the average learner

Look at what the big French flashcard pages sell. Brainscape publishes "Over 10,000 audio flashcards" across levels 0 to 4 plus a verbs set, with per-deck counts like 27 cards for Greetings & Salutations and 389 for Present Tense (read on brainscape.com/learn/french, 21 September 2026). Flashcardo organises the "1000 Most Common French Words" into 50-word blocks, 1-50 through 951-1000. FrenchPod101 offers "1500+ Words & Illustrated Flashcards across 60 Different Topics".

Every one of those is a fixed list, so your review time gets allocated by a stranger's estimate of what a French learner knows rather than by evidence of what you know.

And the cost isn't small. Your daily review load is set by your new-card rate, and each card keeps coming back for months. Anki's own manual puts the ratio plainly: "If you are consistently learning 20 new cards a day, you can expect your daily reviews to be roughly about 200 cards/day." Ten of those 20 being words you already own is half your study time spent confirming things.

What fixes it is a different source for the cards: the words that failed when you tried to use them. More on that below, after the money.

What French flashcards cost, in dollars

Here's the thing that annoyed me into writing this page. Of the pages ranking for "french flashcards" right now, one publishes a price without saying what it buys, one publishes no price at all while gating a feature behind registration, and one shouts FREE while charging you an email address.

So: every figure I could verify on a first-party page today, and an honest blank everywhere I couldn't.

Two of those rows are blank on purpose. I'd rather publish a gap than a number I got from an affiliate roundup, because the roundups copy each other and one stale price rots every other claim on a page.

One price note on Babbel: it runs a countdown sale more or less permanently, so treat $17.95 as the standing monthly rate and anything lower as promotional.

The honest timeline, with a citation

Brainscape's French page says you can be conversational in "six months" with daily practice, "as little as three" with immersion, and that its cards let you "learn everything you need to know TWICE as fast". None of those carry a source.

Here's a number that does. The State Department's Foreign Service Institute publishes its own timelines, and French sits in Category I: 24 to 30 weeks, 552 to 690 class hours. French specifically is at the top of that band, 30 weeks, alongside Spanish. Italian and Portuguese finish in 24.

The line people skip is the next one. FSI's page says "A typical week is 23 hours per week in class and 17 hours of self-study." Multiply that out and 30 weeks is about 1,200 hours in contact with French, not 690. And FSI is measuring toward an integrated score of 3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale, which is professional working proficiency. Nobody in that programme walks out speaking like a native.

FSI's own French figures, read off state.gov on 21 September 2026

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weeks for French, the top of FSI's Category I band, matching Spanish. Italian and Portuguese take 24

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hours a week, since FSI counts 23 in class plus 17 of self-study. That's a full-time job with homework

Against that, what does 20 minutes a day of French flashcards buy? About 122 hours a year. At 40 minutes, 243.

Keep the cards anyway, and be honest about their job: they're the holding tank that stops the vocabulary from your lessons and your listening leaking away between sessions. The hours themselves come from reading, listening and talking.

Why a silent French card teaches you wrong

French punishes silent flashcards harder than any other language on this site's list.

Read beaucoup or oiseau before you've heard either, and your English reading reflexes build a pronunciation with almost no relationship to the real one. Bassetti and Atkinson found the written form keeps bending pronunciation in learners with years of instruction behind them, so this isn't a beginner's problem you outgrow.

Then there's the stream. Il y a des amis qui nous attendent arrives at speed as something closer to yadezami kinouzatond, because liaison, elision and enchaînement between them erase the boundaries your eyes were relying on. I went through that machinery in detail in the French apps post.

Flashcardo never mentions audio on its French page. FrenchPod101's cards are printable paper, so they can't carry any. Brainscape does have audio, which is a real advantage and worth conceding, though its page is about recognising a fixed deck rather than producing speech.

What I'd want on a French card, and what Verbamor builds: two separate recordings of the example sentence. The recall front plays a cloze clip with the answer replaced by a tone, so you have to produce the missing word into the gap yourself. The back plays the complete sentence read through, word included. Same sentence, two files, because a front that spoke the answer would be handing you the thing you're meant to retrieve.

Being precise about one thing, since a comparison table on this site nearly got it wrong once: that audio is text to speech, steered toward a natural native French accent. A machine made it. Babbel voices all its content with real native speakers and genuinely wins that axis.

Anki and Quizlet, fairly

Brainscape's page takes swings at ChatGPT and Duolingo, calling itself "an order of magnitude more effective" than either, and never mentions the two tools a flashcard buyer is actually choosing between.

Anki is free on desktop and Android and US$24.99 once on iPhone, and for a certain kind of person it's the correct answer to this whole page. It ships no French content, so you author every card, and if you enjoy that you'll build something better tuned than anything sold to you. Two things worth knowing going in. FSRS, the modern scheduler, is opt-in rather than the default: the manual calls it "an alternative to Anki's legacy SuperMemo 2 (SM-2) algorithm" and tells you to enable it at the bottom of deck options. Plenty of blogs claim it's been the default since 23.10 and they're wrong. Second, card-building takes real time. Gabriel Wyner, who has done more of it than almost anyone, reports 2 to 3 hours a week to keep a 25-new-cards-a-day habit fed.

Quizlet has an enormous library of French sets, which is its genuine strength and also its risk: the sets are user-generated and unvetted, so a French set can teach you a gender error that takes months to unlearn. Its help centre confirms Learn and Test are paid features with one free practice test per set, and that free TTS audio exists in Flashcards mode. What its 164 English help articles contain zero of is any mention of spaced repetition, a named scheduler, or review intervals. What ships instead is Progress, which buckets terms as Not Studied, Still Learning or Mastered, with no dates attached. You decide when to come back.

Cards built from what you actually said

Back to the premise. If a frequency deck is a guess about the average learner, the obvious alternative is a deck built from evidence about you, and the richest evidence is a recording of you trying to speak French badly.

That's the part of Verbamor worth explaining, since it's the only thing here the other pages can't do. You record a lesson or a conversation, up to 90 minutes. It gets transcribed with speaker turns, then read back for the words and phrases you reached for and missed, the grammar you got wrong, and the corrections your tutor made. Output is capped at 60 words and 30 phrases per recording, so a long lesson doesn't bury you.

Two consequences that fall out of that design, both unavailable to a fixed deck. A word you already own but fumbled gets its due date pushed back into the past, so it resurfaces at the front of tomorrow's queue rather than in three weeks. And a missed form can become its own card, which matters more in French than in English: "conditional perfect of aller" is a card, not a vocabulary item.

You don't need a tutor for any of it. Typing or translating a phrase runs the same pipeline, so the app works on words you met in a podcast or a novel. Five languages, French among them, with a seeded Essentials deck for the starting stretch. iPhone and iPad only, no Android, no web.

The cards are fill-in-the-blank into a sentence from your own material, with a generated picture and the two recordings, scheduled by FSRS. That's the whole product. Whether it's worth $129.99 a year, the US price on 21 September 2026, against a free Anki deck you build yourself depends entirely on whether you'll actually build it.

Questions people actually ask

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Sources

Every load-bearing claim Verbamor makes is traced to its paper on the research page.