Learn French from YouTube, with the transcript in front of you

French spelling keeps letters that speech drops. Final consonants are usually silent, unless the next word starts with a vowel and they come back (that is liaison). Everyday speech also drops the "ne" in negatives and shortens "tu es" to "t'es". A word you know well on the page can be hard to recognize in a fast sentence.

Reading along fixes this one word at a time. When you hear a blur and see "il y a" written under it, the sound and the spelling connect. After a few videos you start to hear the words without the text.

Choose something five to fifteen minutes long, on a topic you like. Work through it in passes. All you need is YouTube with French captions and somewhere to write.

• Watch once with no captions to get the gist. Do not pause.
• Watch again with French captions. Each time you understand the words on screen but did not catch them by ear, replay that line until you can hear them.
• Write down five to ten words or short phrases worth keeping, with the sentence they came from. Phrases like "du coup" or "en fait" are worth more than rare nouns.
• Summarize the video out loud in three sentences, using some of what you wrote down. Look at the list again in two or three days.

Aim for videos where you follow most of what is said. If every line needs a pause, choose something slower: a single speaker talking to the camera is easier than a group.

Explainers, vlogs, cooking videos and interviews work well. Street interviews and comedy are harder, with more slang and more overlap.

French on YouTube comes from France, Québec, Belgium, Switzerland and West Africa, among other places. The accents and some everyday words differ. Start with one you like, then add others.

Look for captions a person wrote. YouTube's automatic French captions are usually close, but they can stumble on names, slang and fast speech.

1. 1

   Import the video

   Open a French video on YouTube and click the Spark Chrome extension. It reads the video's French captions in your browser and opens the video in Spark with its full transcript.

2. 2

   Watch and read together

   The video stays pinned at the top while the transcript follows along below it. Tap any word for its meaning in that sentence and a short AI explanation.

3. 3

   Practice what you met

   Review the words you saved with spaced repetition. Then chat in French about the video, typing or speaking your replies. Spark answers in text for now.

Spark colors every word in the transcript by where it stands for you: new, still being learned, or known. Open a new video and you can see at a glance how much of it you already have.

It also separates the French you recognize from the French you can use. The review and the chat give you practice producing the words you saved, which is the part watching cannot do for you.

Spark's chat replies are text. The listening work on this page comes from the videos themselves. You can type your replies or speak them, and Spark turns your speech into text.

Spark imports from a video's captions, so pick videos with French captions. YouTube import uses the Chrome extension, which means Chrome on a computer. Once a video is in, you can read it in Spark from any browser.

Spark is one option. These tools also help with French video, and each suits a different way of learning.