The default flashcard — English on one side, French on the other — works for about a week and then stops, because French vocabulary is not one word mapped to one word. It is a word plus a gender, a set of verb forms, and a pronunciation the spelling hides. A card that leaves those out is not a shortcut; it is an unfinished card you will have to rebuild later.
A French card carries more than a translation
Four fields cover most of what French requires of you:
- The word and its article. Nouns need their gender attached, or you have learned a word you cannot use.
- A short example sentence. This is where the article, the verb form and any liaison actually appear.
- The spoken form. Written French says less than it writes.
- Part of speech. It decides how the word behaves in a sentence, and it costs one field.
The spoken form is not optional. French writes more than it says: les amis sounds like lez-ami because of liaison, where a final consonant that is silent on its own wakes up before a vowel in the next word. Silent text teaches a language you cannot hear, so add an audio prompt or a sentence that shows the liaison in context. The general reasoning behind this format is the same one in our vocabulary flashcard guide.
Gender belongs on the card, every time
Every French noun is masculine or feminine, and the gender changes the article, the adjective and occasionally the meaning. If you learn main but not la main, you have learned a word you cannot say correctly. Put the article in the answer from the first review: le/la, un/une.
The exceptions are worth their own cards, because they are where the pattern breaks: le problème, le système, la main, la personne, le musée. Endings give useful hints — words in -tion are almost always feminine, -age mostly masculine — but the hint is not the card. The card is the word with its article.
How many cards should a verb be?
The instinct is to put a full conjugation table on one card. Resist it, for the same reason a five-answer card cannot be graded honestly: if you know the nous form and not the ils form, there is no honest button to press.
A workable split is one card per form you actually need, added as you reach it:
- je + présent — the base you speak from
- il/elle + présent — the third person hides most irregulars
- passé composé — forces the avoir versus être choice
- futur proche — the near future you use constantly
- imparfait — the past-tense contrast learners trip on
Start with present and passé composé for the twenty verbs you use most, and add tense cards only as your speaking moves into that tense. Three hundred verb cards before you can order lunch is not thoroughness; it is a queue that never clears.
Cognates get you started; false friends ambush you
English and French share an enormous amount of vocabulary. French has roughly 5,000 word families, and a large share of English words entered through Latin and Norman French, so possible, important, information, nation and attention arrive almost free. Use them, but tag them as easy so the scheduler stops spending time where there is nothing to learn.
The trap is the false friend: a word that looks English and means something else. Each one deserves its own card, with the real meaning in the answer:
| French | Looks like | Actually means |
|---|---|---|
| actuellement | actually | currently, right now |
| éventuellement | eventually | possibly |
| librairie | library | bookshop |
| rester | to rest | to stay |
| blesser | to bless | to wound |
A false friend you have carded is a small win. A false friend you have not is a sentence that means the opposite of what you intended.
When flashcards are the wrong tool for French
Do not card grammar rules. “When to use the subjunctive” is a rule, not a fact, and turning it into a card trains you to recite the rule rather than to produce the sentence. Learn grammar by using it, then card the phrases that came out of it. And do not build five hundred cards before you have spoken one sentence: a deck is raw material, and until you speak, it stays raw. If review is your only study, you are getting good at the app, not at French.
A setup you can keep
None of the above matters if the daily load is too heavy to hold. Set a new-card limit you can sustain — ten a day, adjustable from 1 to 100 — and review daily in short sessions rather than in one weekend burst. Leave the timing to FSRS, which brings each word back just before you would forget it and needs roughly 20–30% fewer reviews than older SM-2 systems at the same retention. In EnjoyCards you grade Again, Hard, Good or Easy, the next interval is shown on the button — 10m, 2d, 15d — and you can study words in both directions, French in and English out, because production is the skill speaking needs.
If you want a first month of structure, the 30-day vocabulary plan lays one out. If you would rather draw your words from what you watch and read, building vocabulary from reading and shows explains how.
Download EnjoyCards for free and build your French deck from ten words — with the gender attached.