Improving your lexicon facilitates communication, oral confidence and reading comprehension. Here are 20 simple and practical tips to enrich your French vocabulary on a daily basis, suitable for beginners and advanced alike.
1. Read regularly: novels, articles, blogs and press to encounter various words in their context.
2. Keep a word book: write down the new terms with their definition and an example.
3. Use index cards (paper or digital) to review words by theme.
4. Learn one word a day: set yourself a realistic goal and use it in a sentence.
5. Watch series and films in French with subtitles to memorize the spoken word.
6. Listen to podcasts and audiobooks to enrich the ear and identify expressions.
7. Play around with apps (Duolingo, Anki, Quizlet) to repeat effectively.
8. Make thematic lists: cooking, work, emotions, travel, etc.
9. Use synonyms and antonyms to understand the nuances of meaning.
10. Practice regular writing: journaling, micro-texts or online comments.
11. Participate in language conversations or tandems to test the words learned.
12. Observe the context: a word takes on meaning according to the sentence and the register.
13. Study prefixes and suffixes to decode new words.
14. Learn idioms and proverbs to sound more natural.
15. Read aloud to work on simultaneous pronunciation and memorization.
16. Use a monolingual dictionary to delve deeper into synonyms and examples.
17. Create mnemonics to remember the spelling or meaning of difficult words.
18. Revise regularly: spaced repetition anchors vocabulary in the long term.
19. Follow French accounts and pages on social networks for a constant flow of words.
20. Set mini-goals (50 words per month) and measure your progress.
Adopting several of these tips in parallel accelerates acquisition: reading, listening, writing and speaking. The important thing is regularity and pleasure. Start today, vary the sources and you will see your vocabulary grow quickly.
