Stop Studying French Grammar. Focus on Vocabulary Instead.

Here’s something counterintuitive: the students who obsess over French grammar are often the ones who make the least progress.

I say this as a French teacher. And as someone learning Japanese — where I’ve experienced firsthand the difference between knowing a grammar rule and being able to actually use a language.

The problem isn’t that grammar is useless. It’s that most people have their priorities backwards. They focus on grammar when they should be focusing on vocabulary, and they focus on theory when they should be focusing on immersion.

Let me explain why — and what to do instead.

---

The Simple Proof: Broken Grammar Still Communicates

Consider this sentence: “Demain manger je banane.”

It’s wrong. The word order is off, the verb isn’t conjugated, the article is missing. Your French teacher would mark it incorrect.

But you understood it, didn’t you? Tomorrow, I’m going to eat a banana. The meaning came through despite all the grammatical errors.

Now try the opposite: “Demain je vais manger une pomme.”

Perfect grammar. But you thought I was going to eat a banana. Because I changed one word — banane to pomme — the entire meaning shifted. Grammatically flawless, but communicating the wrong information.

This is the core insight: vocabulary carries meaning. Grammar organizes it. When vocabulary is wrong, communication breaks down. When grammar is wrong, people still usually understand you.

---

Grammar as Tools, Vocabulary as Ingredients

Think of learning to cook.

When you’re starting out, you don’t need the most sophisticated kitchen equipment. You need a pan, a pot, a knife, an oven. Basic tools. Once you have those, what actually determines whether you can cook well is your ingredients — how many different things you can work with, how you combine them, how you understand their properties.

Grammar is your kitchen equipment. You need the basics: how to form present tense, past tense, future tense, how to express obligation or possibility. These are the essential tools.

But vocabulary is your ingredients. And a chef with a basic set of tools but an extraordinary pantry will always outperform someone with every piece of equipment but only potatoes to cook.

In French: someone with solid basic grammar but a rich vocabulary can express themselves across almost any topic. Someone who has mastered every obscure grammar rule but has limited vocabulary will constantly find themselves unable to say what they mean.

---

The Plateau Problem: When You Feel Stuck

Most learners hit a point — usually around intermediate level — where they feel like they’ve stopped progressing.

They can handle everyday conversations about basic topics. But the moment someone changes the subject to something specific — politics, economics, a professional field, a hobby — they’re lost. Not because they don’t know the grammar. Because they don’t have the vocabulary.

This is what I call the island problem.

Imagine your vocabulary as a collection of islands. When you start learning, you land on the main island: core vocabulary, the 1,000 most common words, the basics of daily life. You explore it thoroughly. Eventually, you feel like you’ve covered everything.

That feeling of stagnation is your signal: it’s time to sail to a new island.

Each new topic is a new island. Politics. Sports. Cinema. Your professional field. A hobby you love. When you decide to explore one of these — by finding French content specifically on that topic — you’re landing on new terrain. At first, everything is unfamiliar. You encounter hundreds of words you don’t recognize. It feels hard.

But within a few weeks of consistent exposure to French content on that topic, the island becomes familiar. You’ve added a whole new territory to your vocabulary map.

---

Why Vocabulary Lists Don’t Work (And What Does)

The traditional approach to vocabulary learning is lists: here are the 20 fruits in French, here are the 15 household objects, here are the 10 most common verbs.

The problem with thematic lists is that they create interference.

When you learn ten words from the same category at the same time, your brain stores them together in the same mental “folder.” The next time you try to recall the word for peach (pêche), your brain opens the fruit folder and finds pear (poire), plum (prune), and peach all competing for attention. Confusion is built in.

The linguist Gabriel Wyner, in his book Fluent Forever, makes this point compellingly. Better than learning lists: encountering vocabulary in context, one word at a time, attached to a meaningful situation.

This is why immersion works. When you hear a word in a natural conversation, it arrives with context — who said it, what they were talking about, what emotion was present. That context makes it stick far better than a translation on a flashcard.

---

Memory Techniques for Stubborn Words

Sometimes there are specific words that just won’t stick, no matter how many times you encounter them. For these, I recommend a technique that sounds strange but works remarkably well: creating a miniature story.

Here’s an example I’ve used with students.

The word poulet means chicken. One student couldn’t remember it no matter how many times they saw it. So we built a small story: imagine you’re grabbing a chicken — pulling it — and it starts squawking “hey!” You’re pulling it, it says “hey”: pull-hey → poulet.

Ridiculous? Yes. Effective? Extremely. The more absurd the image, the more reliably the brain stores it.

This technique is particularly useful for vocabulary that doesn’t have obvious connections to English. I used it extensively when learning Japanese characters — there are around 2,000 to master, and I built a tiny story for each one. What felt tedious at first becomes faster over time as you get better at generating associations quickly.

---

How to Expand Your Vocabulary Systematically

Once you’ve built solid everyday vocabulary, here’s how to keep expanding:

Pick a topic you genuinely care about. This is crucial. If you force yourself to learn political vocabulary but you have no interest in French politics, none of it will stick. But if you love food, cinema, technology, sports, or history — lean into that. Find French content on that topic and immerse yourself.

Prioritize active engagement over passive exposure. Reading French articles on a topic you’re interested in, with a dictionary nearby, beats watching French television you barely understand. Both have value, but active reading builds vocabulary faster.

Try to speak about your new topic. Even if you’re alone. Describe a film you watched, explain your sport’s rules in French, narrate what you’re doing. The act of trying to express ideas in your new vocabulary is what locks it in place. Receptive knowledge (understanding a word when you hear it) becomes productive knowledge (using it yourself) only through practice.

Use spaced repetition for words you want to retain long-term. Apps like Anki are useful here — not for drilling lists, but for reviewing words you’ve encountered in real contexts and want to keep active.

---

The Long Game

Here’s what fluency actually looks like in practice: being able to talk about almost anything.

Not perfectly. Not without gaps. But being able to navigate a conversation on an unfamiliar topic, make yourself understood, and follow the other person’s meaning — even when the subject is specific or technical.

Grammar gets you the structure. But vocabulary gives you the range.

Someone who speaks French fluently isn’t someone who knows every grammar rule. They’re someone who, over years of immersion and practice, has built islands across dozens of topics — enough to navigate whatever conversation comes their way.

Start with your main island. Then sail.

---

This article is based on Episode 72 of the French with Félix podcast. Listen to the full episode →