You Probably Don't Need More French Words

Apparently, 907 extremely high-frequency words were doing an extraordinary amount of work in French.

My first reaction was not:

This is going to change the way I teach.

It was:

That's a bit of a claim.

The number came from the work of French linguist Étienne Brunet.

Brunet analysed the 90-million-word corpus used for the Trésor de la langue française. He found that 907 words occurred more than 7,000 times and together accounted for more than 90 per cent of that particular corpus.

That does not mean 907 words make up 90 per cent of every modern conversation in France. The corpus contained mainly written material, including literary texts dating from 1789 to 1965.

Frequency always depends on what has been counted.

But the finding revealed something important: a relatively small group of French words does a wildly disproportionate amount of work.

Picoche and Rolland took that idea much further. Their Dictionnaire du français usuel did not present 907 words as a list to memorise. It organised approximately 15,000 useful words into 442 articles built around high-frequency words.

Those words became heads of networks.

They opened into different meanings, grammatical structures, expressions, relationships and other vocabulary.

The interesting idea was no longer:

Could somebody really learn 907 words?

It was:

How much French could one familiar word help somebody unlock?

As I sat with the research, I began to recognise something.

This was how I had learnt French as a twenty-something living and working in Lyon.

I used expressions such as:

Il faut que je m'en aille.

I knew when I needed them. I knew how they sounded. I knew what happened when I said them.

What I did not necessarily know was that I was using falloir, followed by que, followed by a reflexive verb in the subjunctive.

That grammatical understanding came later.

The useful piece of French came first. I used it, heard it, adjusted it and gradually understood more of what was happening inside it.

I had not waited until I could explain every moving part before allowing myself to speak.

Thank goodness. I might still be in Lyon now, trying to leave somebody's flat!

By the time I encountered Picoche's work, I had already spent years teaching adults.

Again and again, I met people who possessed far more French than they could actually use.

They had vocabulary lists.

They had conjugations.

They had phrases for the hotel, the restaurant and the railway station. They had completed exercises, listened to podcasts and maintained impressive streaks on apps.

The French was there.

But it was scattered.

Vocabulary and grammar had been learnt as separate subjects. An English translation had become the complete meaning of a French word. Familiar words had been marked as "done", even when they rarely appeared during conversation.

When speaking, learners could not reliably find and combine what they knew.

So they did what seemed logical.

They added more French.

Another list. Another tense. Another set of travel phrases.

It was a little like responding to an untidy kitchen drawer by buying more utensils.

What these learners needed was not necessarily more.

They needed to see what was already worth strengthening.

I ran a two-month experiment with my students using the high-frequency words.

The learning that emerged was rich. Very rich.

One word opened into another use, then an expression, a piece of grammar, a pronunciation pattern and a connection nobody had expected.

But an ordinary vocabulary list could not contain any of it meaningfully.

In fact, we were in danger of recreating the same problem in a different form. The 907 words might have reduced the size of French, but each of those words could attract tens, hundreds and potentially thousands of others.

I needed a way to blank out the noise.

That was where Bank or Borrow began.

When learners encountered a piece of French, they could ask:

Is this valuable enough to me to Bank?

Or:

Do I want to Borrow it, try it and see whether it becomes useful?

Later came Exclude:

This is not relevant, useful or manageable for me now. I can leave it without treating that decision as failure.

The Cahier became the place for Banked French: language that had been understood, personalised and made dependable enough to deserve a place in someone's own working French.

Borrow was an action, not another list to maintain.

Exclude was permission to move on.

The Cahier did not need to become an archive of everything a learner had ever encountered. We have all owned notebooks like that. Very worthy. Beautifully highlighted. Never opened again.

It needed to become a personal resource containing French the learner could genuinely see themselves using.

Alongside this, I had begun thinking about learning in terms of horsepower.

Instead of asking how advanced a piece of French looked, I asked:

What can this help an adult learner do?

A long or unusual word may look impressive while being useful once every five years.

A word such as PRENDRE, meanwhile, can carry you through cafés, restaurants, shops, transport, appointments, choices, decisions and dozens of ordinary transactions.

It has horsepower.

Then we reached PASSER.

I had expected PASSER to be productive. It surpassed everything I had imagined.

At first, learners might reasonably think:

PASSER means "to pass".

But then it begins moving:

And while PASSER moves, it begins pulling grammar behind it.

Once we pass the salt to Sophie, we have a reason to examine the relationship between the person, the object and the verb. We can see why je passe le sel à Sophie might later become je le lui passe.

Pronouns are no longer an abstract table waiting to be memorised.

They are doing a job inside something the learner already understands.

Through PASSER, we found ourselves working naturally with prepositions, direct and indirect objects, word order, imperatives, tonic pronouns, reflexive structures, masculine and feminine forms, and pronunciation.

I watched learners who had struggled with foundational grammar take one word and run with it.

Entire exchanges developed around PASSER without sounding forced or tedious. Other French gathered around it and became steadier.

This was the thing I had been trying to achieve throughout my teaching career:

Vocabulary was not sitting beside grammar. It was making grammar visible.

At The French Room, each month now centres on one carefully chosen high-frequency word or construction.

The month follows a deliberate movement:

We begin by establishing the word's horsepower.

Why does it deserve your attention? What could it help you say or understand? Is it sufficiently reusable to earn a month of your French life?

We begin with something recognisable.

That does not mean there will be nothing new to discover. "Beginner" French often turns out to have been hiding some rather sophisticated equipment.

We strengthen what is familiar, challenge narrow translations and start creating personally useful language.

Then we move into less obvious meanings, idiomatic uses, grammatical relationships, sounds and connections.

By the end of the month, I invariably feel that we have only scraped the surface.

That is not evidence that the month has failed.

It is evidence of the word's horsepower.

The point is not to master every possible use. It is to leave with stronger routes through the word and language you can continue to reuse.

Understanding something during a Tuto is not the same as having it available during conversation.

That is why the wider method carries French through three different forms of ownership.

Bank it means working with the language in your Cahier: understanding it, personalising it and making it retrievable.

Voice it means bringing it into your own spoken voice. You work on sound, rhythm, pacing and intention until the language begins to feel sayable.

Live it means keeping it working when another person responds and the conversation changes direction.

This is where French stops being a piece of knowledge and begins behaving like communication.

The same high-frequency word may be shared by everyone, but no two Cahiers need to look alike.

A swimmer, a beekeeper, a scientist and a wine professional will attract different language around the same central word. Their specialist vocabulary sits alongside the high-frequency French that allows them to use it.

The 907 words are not a fence around the language.

They are its connective tissue.

When Kanishka Nangare visited The French Room for Class Central, she was initially sceptical about our decision to spend a month with one word.

During our month with FAIRE, she encountered:

tant qu'à faire

It is the sort of expression that resists a neat word-for-word translation. Depending on the situation, it carries an idea such as:

While we're at it… We might as well…

Kanishka brought it into a Live Class. Then other people began using it.

The phrase travelled around the group.

That moment mattered because she had not simply recognised tant qu'à faire in a lesson. She had selected it, tried it in conversation and made it available to everybody else.

In her independent account, she described the month as more effective for her than previous experiences with apps and language schools. She also felt more comfortable around French and less overwhelmed.

This is what reuse can do.

The word does not stay on the page waiting to be ticked off. It starts circulating.

The French Room 907 Method is not a finished programme that students consume quietly while I unveil one answer after another.

Learners notice where French becomes interesting.

During our work with PASSER, one learner responded to passe-moi le sel with:

"If someone ordered me to pass the salt, they'd find it lobbed over their shoulder."

Fair enough.

But her reaction exposed something valuable. Was the French imperative inherently rude? Was the problem the grammar, the tone, the relationship, or the English translation ringing in her ears?

Another student then asked why French speakers could not simply use the conditional all the time if it was more polite.

That question inspired me to make three new Tutos.

My teaching moved because the learners had found the live wire inside the language.

That is part of the method too. We follow the word seriously enough to notice when it opens a door we had not expected. It is one of my favourite parts. It keeps me super-energised as a teacher covering a subject I have been teaching for well over a decade.

The 907 words are not a syllabus to complete.

They are not a magical fluency total.

Learning 907 English translations would merely give you another vocabulary list, albeit one with a very satisfying number at the top.

The number tells us where attention might profitably begin.

The method lies in what happens next:

The question is not:

How many French words have you covered?

It is:

What can the words you know now help you do?

That copy of the Dictionnaire du français usuel had spent six years undisturbed before it was brought up for me at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

But the thinking inside it was anything but dusty.

It described something I had experienced in my own French and repeatedly witnessed in adult learners: ordinary words are often carrying far more than we realise.

My work has been to turn that insight into a practical adult-learning system, one that reduces the noise, makes room for personal choice and carries language all the way into speech.

You may not need another fifty French words as urgently as you think.

You may need one familiar word to show you what it can really do.