Out now on Steam · 1,000 words · 40 clusters · 20 lessons
Français
The polite stranger becomes the friend.
Listen · Read · Repeat · Rate · Fight
You begin at a safe distance — Bonjour, comment allez-vous ? A thousand words later somebody says on peut se tutoyer, and the whole register changes. Metropolitan French, chosen by how often you'll actually meet it.
From vous to tu
Bonne continuation — keep going.
French Core is one road in, walked in five tiers. You start where everyone starts: greetings, the people in front of you, the body, the first verbs, food, numbers, the clock. Then the day widens — waking up, the town, the market, the calendar, the people you're closest to. By the fifth tier you're reading about law and administration, media, digital life, celebrations, and the fine shades of adjective that separate joli from magnifique.
Every word was drawn from subtitle-corpus frequency data — the French that actually reaches your ear in film, television and conversation, weighted toward what matters most for comprehension. Grammar arrives tier by tier, and the example sentences stay inside what you've already been taught, so nothing on a card runs ahead of you. Finish Core and you'll have read more than 7,000 words of French in context.
First contact, family, the body, core verbs, food, counting, the clock.
Waking up, around town, the market, the calendar, close bonds, everyday life.
Getting ready, the house, weather, shops and money, moods, and the past tense.
Work, journeys, school, the wild world, mind and opinion, character.
Admin and law, media and arts, digital life, celebrations, big ideas, fine shades.
Five tiers, forty clusters
Every cluster is 25 cards and ends in a boss fight. Nothing is hidden — the full list is on the word lists page, free to read before you buy.
5 tiers · 40 clusters · 1,000 cards20 reference lessonsA1–A2 foundation
Progressively more challenging
The example sentences increase in complexity tier by tier — and never use grammar you haven't met.
- J'ai deux frères et une sœur.I have two brothers and a sister.
- Le week-end je cours, mais le matin je marche.On weekends I run, but in the mornings I walk.
- Elle couche son fils chaque soir à huit heures.She puts her son to bed every evening at eight o'clock.
- Il pleuvait beaucoup ; ainsi, nous sommes restés à la maison.It was raining a lot, so we stayed at home.
- Pourriez-vous m'expliquer pourquoi vous êtes encore en retard aujourd'hui ?Could you explain to me why you're late again today? (formal)
le · la, in colour
Every noun carries its article colour-coded to gender, so you learn the gender with the word instead of after it. Tap a card to flip it.
Élision is where most learners lose the gender: before a vowel sound le and la both collapse into l', and the clue disappears. FlashBoss keeps the colour underneath the apostrophe, so l'ami reads masculine and l'eau reads feminine at a glance. The h-aspiré words that refuse to elide — le héros, la honte — get their own lesson.
Twenty lessons, fired in sequence
A reference lesson unlocks at the exact card where you first need it, and stays available afterwards. All twenty are free to read on the lessons page.
- 01French pronunciationVowels, the nasals, the silent finals, and the CaReFuL consonants that survive at the end of a word.
- 03Tu vs vousWho gets which, why vous is always the safe opening, and what on peut se tutoyer means when someone offers it.
- 06Il y a & telling timeThe two structures you need before you can arrange anything with anyone.
- 08Liaison & élisionWhy l'hôtel loses the vowel and aux hôtels gains a [z].
- 12H-aspiré wordsThe short, closed list where the silent h still blocks élision: la honte, never l'honte.
- 13Avoir or être?Which auxiliary the passé composé takes, and the verbs that insist on être.
- 14Est — a homographOne spelling, two words, two pronunciations: il est [ɛ] against l'est [ɛst].
- 17Subjonctif introThe mood English lost, met at the point where the cards start needing it.
Also inside: reading a card, the present tense, negation, the imperative, futur proche, passé composé, reflexive verbs, imparfait, conditionnel présent, futur simple, héros vs héroïne, and a closing lesson on where to go next.
The words that look like yours
French shares thousands of words with English — and a handful of them are lying to you. The cards say so. Tap to flip.
The Pareto Principle
3 packs. 10% of the French vocabulary for 90% of French use cases. Core is out; the other two follow in sequence.
First contact to belonging, in five tiers, with twenty reference lessons. The road in.
out nowThe next thousand — everyday French at speed, and the casual spoken register. Requires Core.
coming in sequenceThe educated standard: formal register, structured argument, the press. Requires Pareto 1.
coming in sequenceFlashcards as an integrated system
- Fibonacci SRS
- Rate each card 0–5. The better you know a word, the longer before it returns — spaced repetition on Fibonacci intervals.
- Boss fights
- Each of the forty clusters is gated by a duel you can't win without confronting and overcoming your most difficult words.
- Graduation
- Beat a cluster and its cards leave your daily deck for good. The deck gets smaller as you learn.
- Audio
- Clean French Piper text-to-speech on every target word and every example sentence — the siwis fr_FR voice, Metropolitan French. It is synthesis, not a recording of a speaker.
- Your language
- All 1,000 cards carry their translation and their notes in German, Japanese and Spanish as well as English, and all 20 reference lessons have German, Spanish and Japanese siblings. The interface speaks the same four. French Core is fully playable without a word of English.
- Gender by sight
- Blue for le, magenta for la, on every noun — and the colour survives the elision to l'.
- Frequency
- The word list is built from subtitle-corpus frequency data — the French you'll actually hear, first.
- Lessons
- Twenty reference lessons fire at the point in the sequence where they unlock what you're about to read.
Questions
The things people ask before they buy.
Which French is this?
Metropolitan French — the French of France — from the first card to the last, in the vocabulary, the example sentences and the voice.
Do I need anything else to play it?
Yes. French Core is a DLC for the FlashBoss base game, so you need the base game as well. Everything else — the lessons, the audio, the boss fights — is inside the pack.
Is the audio recorded by a native speaker?
No, and we won't pretend otherwise. Every target word and every example sentence is spoken by a neural text-to-speech voice — the siwis fr_FR Piper voice, trained on a French-of-France dataset. It is clear and consistent, and it is synthesis, not a person.
Can I play it in German, Spanish or Japanese?
Fully. Every card and every lesson exists in all four languages — no English needed. All 1,000 cards carry German, Japanese and Spanish translations and notes, all 20 reference lessons have German, Spanish and Japanese siblings, and the game's own interface is available in English, German, Spanish and Japanese.
What level does Core take me to?
An A1–A2 foundation: 1,000 high-frequency words and twenty grammar lessons covering the présent, passé composé, imparfait, conditionnel and futur, plus an introduction to the subjonctif. By the end you can read simple French and follow an A2 classroom, with more than 7,000 words of French read in context along the way.
What about Pareto 1 and Pareto 2?
Both are written — 1,000 words each — and they're coming in sequence. Pareto 1 builds on Core with the next thousand high-frequency words and the casual spoken register; Pareto 2 reaches for the educated standard. No dates yet.
Can I see the words before I buy?
All of them. The complete Core word list is on the word lists page and all twenty reference lessons are on the lessons page — free, printable, no account.
Is there a demo?
There's a playable boss fight in the browser, if you want to know what the fight feels like before you commit: try the demo.
Start at vous.
A thousand words, forty boss fights, and twenty lessons between you and the moment someone offers you tu.