Dr Suzanne Kobeisse
One of the most common things I hear from students is this: "I would practise more, but I have nobody to speak French with." I understand where this comes from. Speaking a language feels like it requires another person. But in practice, a large proportion of the most effective language practice you can do does not require anyone else at all.
Between lessons, the time you spend actively engaging with French is what builds the habit. Here is what that can look like.
Shadowing: the most underused technique
Shadowing means listening to a French speaker and speaking along with them simultaneously, or a fraction of a second behind, mimicking their pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation as closely as you can. It is one of the most powerful techniques for improving spoken French, and almost no self-study guides mention it.
To shadow properly, you need material that is spoken at a natural pace by a native speaker on a topic you can roughly follow. A French podcast works well. So does a short clip from a French news channel, a French YouTube video, or a scene from a French film you have already seen.
Play five to ten seconds. Pause. Repeat what you heard, matching the speed and sound as closely as you can. Play it again and check yourself. Move on. Do this for ten minutes and your mouth will be tired. That is exactly what you want. You are training your articulators to produce French sounds at French speed, and that physical training transfers directly into real conversation.
For shadowing material, French podcasts aimed at learners are ideal early on. Coffee Break French, InnerFrench (a podcast aimed at intermediate learners that uses natural speech), and Journal en Français Facile from RFI are all widely available and genuinely useful at different levels.
Speaking to yourself
This sounds odd. It is not. Narrating your own actions in French is one of the most practical forms of low-pressure speaking practice available. As you make breakfast, describe what you are doing. Je prépare le café. Je coupe le pain. Je mets la table. You do not need to be correct. You need to be speaking.
You can also have internal monologues in French during the day. Think about what you need to do, in French. Comment mentally on the weather, the commute, what you are eating. None of it needs to be perfect. What it does is build the habit of thinking in French rather than thinking in English and translating.
When you hit a gap in your vocabulary, note the word you needed and look it up afterwards. That word will stick far better than one you memorised in isolation, because you needed it in a real moment. That is how vocabulary acquisition works best.
Reading aloud
Reading a French text silently and reading it aloud are completely different exercises. Reading aloud forces you to process the language at speaking speed, not reading speed. It trains you to deal with the sounds on the page rather than bypassing them. And it gives you a sense of how connected speech works: the liaisons, the elisions, the rhythm.
Choose something at a level where you understand most of what you are reading. A French news article, a short story, a recipe, a blog post. Read it aloud slowly at first, then at a more natural pace. Record yourself occasionally and listen back. The gap between how you think you sound and how you actually sound is often illuminating, and narrowing that gap is part of the work.
Language exchange apps
If you do want a real conversation partner, language exchange apps connect you with French speakers who want to practise English. Apps like Tandem and HelloTalk are specifically built for this purpose. You spend half the conversation in French, half in English, and both parties benefit.
This does require another person, but it is not a class and there is no cost. The key to making it work is consistency: a regular partner you message weekly is more valuable than a series of random one-off conversations. Write first if speaking feels too pressured. Voice messages are an excellent halfway house: more like speech than text, but with a moment to compose yourself.
French YouTube and streaming
Passive listening while doing something else has limited value. Active listening is a different matter. Pick a French YouTube channel on a topic you are genuinely interested in, whether that is cooking, history, travel, sport, or anything else, and watch it with French subtitles if possible, not English ones. Pause when you do not understand something. Rewind and listen again. Build your vocabulary around content you actually care about.
For films and series, the same principle applies. Call My Agent (Dix pour cent) is one of the most authentically Parisian French things available on streaming and the dialogue is genuinely natural. Lupin is accessible, fast-moving, and uses excellent contemporary French. Both have French subtitles available. Watch them as active practice rather than background noise.
Conversation with AI
This is a relatively new option, but it works. Writing to a conversational AI model in French and asking it to respond in French gives you a responsive, patient, infinitely available conversation partner. You can ask it to correct your French, to explain errors, to suggest better phrasing. You can have a conversation about anything at all, at any hour, with no pressure and no embarrassment.
The limitations are real: an AI will not replicate the exact spontaneity of a French friend or colleague, and the feedback on pronunciation is absent entirely. But for building sentence construction, practising tense use, and developing the habit of producing written French quickly, it is a genuinely useful tool that I encourage my students to use between lessons.
The principle underneath all of this
What connects every technique in this list is active, focused engagement with French output. Not passive consumption. Not reading about grammar. Producing or responding to French, repeatedly, in real time, even imperfectly.
Fifteen minutes of shadowing will do more for your spoken French than an hour of looking at conjugation tables. Twenty minutes of reading aloud will improve your pronunciation faster than any app. The tools exist. The question is simply whether you use them.