Practice speaking French

How you practice French on Tokmia

Tokmia runs lives — group voice conversations you can drop into. Every live has a stage and an audience, and you arrive in the audience. You can stay there and just listen for as long as you want; when you are ready, you raise your hand and the host brings you up. A live holds up to eight speakers, so the people who come up actually get a turn.

If a group feels like too much, Practice Now pairs you one-to-one with somebody learning your language while you learn theirs, on a fixed timer with a shared prompt on screen — eight minutes of free conversation, or seven minutes of vocabulary or role play. Neither of you has to invent the first sentence.

French is one of the twelve languages on Tokmia with the learning side fully built out, so words you look up during a conversation and grammar mistakes pulled from the session afterwards go into spaced-repetition decks you can review the next day.

What is actually hard about speaking French

Not the same as what is hard about reading it. These are the things that show up specifically when you have to produce the language in real time:

Half the letters are not pronounced, until suddenly they are

Final consonants are silent — until liaison reattaches them to the next word. Vous avez is vou-zavez. Learners who build their French from text hear a stream with no obvious word boundaries, because the boundaries genuinely moved.

Nasal vowels have no English equivalent

Vin, vent and vont are three different words distinguished by vowels most learners' ears were not trained to separate. Producing them is easier than hearing them, which is why speaking practice with a native speaker beats another round of listening exercises.

Tu or vous, decided before the sentence starts

You cannot defer it. Getting it wrong is rarely serious, but the hesitation while you decide is exactly what conversation does not give you time for.

What a French live looks like

Hosts name their own lives and set the level, so you can tell before joining whether it is meant for you. Titles look like:

• Discussion libre en français
• Français débutant — on parle lentement
• Préparation à l'entretien d'embauche

Examples of how hosts title lives, not a listing of what is running right now.

Before you start

• Listening counts. Sitting in the audience is a legitimate way to use Tokmia and a lot of people do it for their first week.
• Nobody can message you unless you follow each other back. There is no setting that opens your inbox to strangers — see Safety.
• Nothing is recorded. Voice conversations are never recorded, by us or for us.
• It is free. Joining and hosting lives and the review decks cost nothing, with no minute limit and no ads.

Free when it launches. Other languages