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French Uncovered is an online course that teaches French through a story. French vocabulary, grammar, culture, listening, and reading skills are tied in to each of the story’s chapters. The course was created by famous polyglot Olly Richards, but native French speakers provide audio for the story as well as some video lessons.
French Uncovered covers (haha) a lot of ground. But is it the perfect French course for you? I recently tried out the Beginner level Course of French Uncovered. Here’s what I discovered.
Is French Uncovered the best French learning course or app?
French Uncovered has a lot of appeal for both visual and audio learners. The chapters of the story that the course is based on supposed to be listened to as well as read, and there’s lots of learning and review material in both written and video form.
French Uncovered is also one of the few language learning apps or courses that offers audio in both mainland and Canadian French.
That said, while you’ll get a lot of learning material in various formats with French Uncovered, the information is sometimes too packed together. For instance, multiple major grammar concepts are explained in a single video, without giving learners time to really process and understand and practice each individual one. I think this would be especially challenging for Beginner level learners, who are just learning the foundational elements and rules of French.
Unlike many other French courses and apps, French Uncovered also doesn’t really monitor or follow your learning progress (or at least not in the focused, intense way many other language learning apps do), so it’s probably not a great course for anyone who has trouble staying motivated. French Uncovered would be better for independent, self-motivated learners.
It’s also not a great course for learners who like to be up to date with tech and fully connected. A surprising amount of French Uncovered’s material is meant to be used offline, on your own time. For instance, you’re told you should print out dialogues and find a dialogue partner to practice them with, as if you were in a class. It made me think back to learning French in the ‘90’s, but nostalgia aside, it seems like a paid course today should offer more resources than that.
Additionally, some features that are pretty standard for just about any kind of language learning course today, are totally not available on French Uncovered. Most notably, the course lacks features like an AI pronunciation checker or exercises that make dialogues more interactive.
Read on if you’d like to know more about what’s good and bad about French Uncovered – and how the course works.
What is French Uncovered?
Created by polyglot Olly Richards as one of the languages available under his StoryLearning system, French Uncovered uses a story to help teach things like French vocabulary and grammar in context.
The idea of this is that students will learn these things through how they’re used in a story, not just by memorizing vocabulary lists or lessons on grammar.
The course promotes instinctive language learning, as opposed to progressive learning. But in fact, there is so much learning material that does essentially start from the beginning that it’s hard to notice this. The only time it’s really apparent is when students are asked to listen to a story chapter first, rather than reading it or looking at vocabulary they’ll learn, etc.
After listening to a chapter of the story, learners can read it, watch video lessons about the grammar concepts and vocabulary covered, do practice exercises, and more.
Each chapter is accompanied by around 7-8 video lessons, as well as explanations and exercises covering vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and culture (though it’s light on culture).
All course materials (including the story) are available online or can be downloaded so that you can use them offline, too.
French Uncovered is available for levels Beginner to Upper Intermediate (but note that only the Beginner level is available for a 7-day free trial).
What’s good about French Uncovered?
Here are some things I like about French Uncovered:
• The idea of learning through a story. When I was studying French in school back in the day, we sometimes did this, as well. As Richards says, it does make it easier to learn vocabulary and even grammar when you have a specific context that can help you remember and use them. Stories can also introduce you to cultural features of the language you’re learning, which is the case here, at least to some degree.
• Good for both visual and audio learners. You might think that focusing on a story means reading will be the focus, but French Uncovered heavily features both the audio of the story and the written part. The course strikes a nice balance of learning and practice through both reading and listening.
• Lots of learning materials. Each course level comes with story chapters in both print and audio (in fact, there are two audio versions: mainland French and Canadian French), videos explaining grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation concepts, practice exercises, printable dialogue sheets, and more! There’s also a good amount of review material and exercises, too.
• The course is clearly outlined. This vast amount of learning material is easy to navigate, since French Uncovered has an excellent, clear outline (Course Curriculum) that lets you easily access the particular learning material you want, without a lot of searching or fumbling around.
• Covers a lot of different learning areas. French Uncovered lets you learn and practice French listening, reading, grammar, vocabulary, and a bit of culture.
• You can access any lesson or exercise in your level. Unlike some French learning apps or courses that keep you from advancing until you’ve completed a unit, French Uncovered lets you access all of the lessons, videos, exercises, and story chapters in the course level you’ve purchased. This is something I always appreciate, because it lets you go back and review or go forward if you’re already familiar with the concepts you’re currently covering.
• You can download pretty much everything on the course so that you can study offline as much as you want. You’re not dependent on an internet connection or a subscription in order to continue learning and reviewing.
• Audio for the story is available in mainland French and Canadian French. This is unfortunately not the standard with French learning apps or courses, so a pretty nice feature if you’re focused on learning Canadian French.
• Like the French Together app, audio is performed by native speakers. Native French speaking teachers also host the learning videos.
• Good for independent learners. While many language learning apps and courses constantly remind you of your progress, encourage you to practice every day, and generally try to keep you motivated and on your toes, French Uncovered gives you all of the resources you need, has a friendly tone when it comes to the learning videos and encouraging remarks when you get a question wrong during an exercise, but otherwise leaves you to it.
You will get lots of emails from them, but during my 7-day trial, at least, none of these had to do with my learning progress or how often I was using the course. Given how frequently other apps tend to try to motivate you, it can come off as a bit negligent. But it brought back memories of my own French learning journey in the early days of the internet, where you’d use mostly real-life learning materials and try to teach yourself French (if you weren’t taking a class or course in person). If you’re someone who has no trouble with motivation, this is totally fine. If you’re not, though, you might struggle.
• The grammar lessons are pretty good. The grammar lessons, which are presented as videos by a native French speaking tutor named Diane (at least for Beginner level), are done in a friendly and approachable way, but are also very clearly explained and cover a lot of ground. You’ll also see visuals, with the teacher using a white board at times, a very helpful feature.
The one thing I will say I didn’t like is that each video tends to cover multiple grammar concepts that aren’t directly related. I would have preferred shorter videos focusing on each grammar concept, with maybe some practice exercises in between, just to make it easy to study specific grammar issues.
What’s not good about French Uncovered
Here are some things I don’t like about French Uncovered:
• The log-in page is hard to find. There is a link to it in one of the first emails you receive, but if you do a general search or go to French Uncovered’s landing page, there’s no login option. This may be the first French learning app or course I’ve tried that makes it hard to login!
• Many of the course’s exercises and activities are rather analog. For instance, in Lesson One, you’re asked to download the story chapter transcript and then take notes and write down cognates you find (Cognates are explained in one of the videos included in the chapter lessons). This is perfectly fine and may even be helpful; there are studies that show writing helps us retain information better than typing or doing exercises. But it seems a bit strange not to have at least another option that is more tech involved, especially for the price of this course. It comes off as cheap, not academic, and it’s hard to determine which is the real reason for it (maybe both?).
I’m writing this as a Luddite who takes notes in actual physical notebooks and probably would do something like this when studying French, but it still seemed weird to me in this day and age. And there’s a real issue: There’s no way to prove you’ve done the exercise, or to see which mistakes you’ve made, etc. since it’s just you writing on paper.
• Dialogues can’t be practiced without another French learner. I just mentioned that many of French Uncovered’s exercises are printouts. While this may or may not be a good thing, the dialogue practice surprised me: Instead of an interactive exercise where you fill in the blank or something at the very least, learners are simply instructed to print out the dialogue script and find a conversation partner in real life. The course does have a “community” forum where you can ask questions, etc., so you may be able to find a partner there, but basically, it feels like you are really on your own. If French Uncovered were free, this might be understandable. But I don’t think I’ve ever come across a paid French learning app or course today that doesn’t offer at least some way to practice dialogues without relying on someone else.
• The course looks cheap, especially considering how much it costs. Exercises and even the story text, for instance, aren’t integrated into the general graphics of the course. Instead, you have to use a scroll bar in the Quizlet windows that house them, in order to see/select all responses. This makes them less easy to use then any French apps or courses I’ve tested. If the app were free or inexpensive, that might not be so bad, but for the price, you’d think it could be at least slightly better looking and easier to use.
• LOTS of salesy emails are sent to you. I’ve definitely gotten bombarded by emails from some other French learning apps I’ve tried (Bonjour, Duolingo!), but those rarely overtly seemed to be trying to sell me something, and most of the time they seemed to be trying to motivate or help me learn. I respect the hustle and definitely understand that it’s hard to earn money in this economy, but I wish that the emails I was sent had at least been a bit more subtle, or mixed in with ones that tried to motivate me or show me tips for learning French, etc.
• Culture lessons are way too short and often skip over actual important cultural aspects. Not many French learning apps and courses include culture information and lessons, so I was excited that this one did. But these “lessons” are usually only a few sentences or paragraphs long, and often skip over important facts. For instance, the culture lesson on French bank holidays was essentially just a brief paragraph followed by a list of holidays in France, with no explanation of their significance, etc. Even if it didn’t go very in depth, the lesson should at the very least have mentioned that many French people faire le pont (turn holidays into four-day weekends). This is a big thing in contemporary French culture. To be fair, I only tried the Beginner level of French Uncovered, so maybe the higher learning levels have longer and more detailed culture lessons. But I was definitely disappointed by what I found here.
• The initial listening exercise seems like a waste of time for absolute beginners. Some French learning apps, notably Pimsleur, do this thing where they have learners listen to some French audio with no explanation or context first, and explain it after. Personally, I have never liked this method or understood the point, especially for absolute beginners who have no chance of understanding anything. Maybe if it was a video, that would make sense to me, since people can intuit things from body language and other visual cues, but otherwise, you’re just listening to nonsense if you have very little or no French listening experience.
While apps like Pimsleur make new learners listen to a few sentences at most, French Uncovered asks absolute beginner learners to spend several minutes listening to an entire story chapter, when, especially in the first lessons, they’ll probably understand nothing. It feels like they’re trying to insist on this intuitive method of learning, but to me that is waaaay too much time to listen to something you aren’t supposed to understand. If they wanted to do this, why not break the audio into sections?
• Review quizzes at the end of each chapter are disappointingly short. The quizzes only have a single question about each thing you’ve learned. Also, you don’t have to go back and answer correctly in order to complete the quiz.
• The course’s exercises aren’t varied enough. There are several types of exercises you can do, but questions tend to fall back on plain old multiple choice, especially for the end-of-chapter quizzes.
• There are no pronunciation checkers or exercises. While French Uncovered features lessons on pronunciations, there is no way to really practice what you’ve learned (at least not integrated into the course). For a paid course, this seems totally inadequate nowadays. Even many free language learning apps have pronunciation checkers and interactive dialogues. In fairness, it’s not to say that all of them are totally on point, but most do a decent job.
• Good grammar lessons but cram too many different concepts into one lesson. It’s a shame they didn’t make shorter videos featuring each grammar concept separately.
• The story that you follow in order to learn isn’t very exciting, and worse still — it ends on a cliffhanger! Instead of getting the reward of finishing the story based on everything you’ve learned, you have to purchase the next course level (probably levels) to continue and find out how it ends. Very clever, from a sales point of view, but not very nice for learners. I was surprised that the course’s creators didn’t finish the first mystery the characters experience, and then say they’ll be back to solve another one in the next course level’s story. They could even have introduced a new mystery to solve at the end of this one. But nope. You’re just left with a cliffhanger, which is frustrating and to me once again shows French Uncovered’s very commercial nature.
How much does French Uncovered cost?
As of this writing, French Uncovered costs $297 for lifetime access to its Beginner level course. This includes any updates made to the course, as well.
StoryLearning’s website isn’t clear about the cost of the other levels of French Uncovered , which range from Pre-Intermediate to Upper Intermediate. I’m assuming each one is the same price. Course bundles are available as well.
Should I use French Uncovered to learn French?
Overall, French Uncovered offers lots of French lessons and practice material, but a surprising amount of it is supposed to be printed out and used offline.
In this and a few other ways, the course seems like it cuts corners, and yet, the emails you’re sent daily as well as the story’s cliffhanger ending feel very salesy and profit-oriented. These are both disappointing because French Uncovered is a paid course that’s not cheap.
That said, if this doesn’t bother you and if you’re an independent, self-motivated learner who doesn’t mind some old school offline learning, you might love French Uncovered.
Whatever your learning style and expectations, there are some areas of learning that French Uncovered doesn’t…cover, or doesn’t cover enough. To practice speaking and pronouncing French, for instance, the French Together app would be an excellent additional resource.
And for more in-depth information on French culture, it’s a good idea to read, watch, and listen to books, periodicals, shows, movies, and podcasts in French. You can find lists of these in our article on French learning resources (many of which are free).
Whichever French learning app(s) or course(s) you choose, good luck on your French learning journey!