Château

Learn French.

Château is a language learning app that builds proficiency quickly and maintains it. Château combines several of the best language learning practices under one curriculum:

  • Read and listen to cultural and practical passages to see your target language in context.
  • Learn a little grammar and about eight new words a day.
  • Drill the grammar until you can actively produce it.
  • Review the vocabulary with spaced repetition.

With twenty minutes a day you can cover in one year what a college class covers in two years, and retain more of it.

See what you can read after three months.

French · Passage 87 Le week-end à Monaco

Ce week-end, nous allons visiter Monaco. C’est le plus petit pays du monde après le Vatican ! La famille Grimaldi est la famille royale depuis sept cents ans. Mon ami va conduire. Nice est à quinze minutes. Nous allons voir le Palais du Prince et le Casino de Monte-Carlo. Les habitants ne peuvent pas entrer dans le casino. C’est seulement pour les touristes ! Nous allons aussi visiter le Musée Océanographique près de la mer. Mon ami dit : « On va manger dans un bon restaurant. » Je regarde les prix. À Monaco, tout est cher. Très, très cher.

This weekend we are going to visit Monaco. It is the smallest country in the world after the Vatican. The Grimaldi family has been the royal family for seven hundred years. My friend is going to drive. Nice is fifteen minutes away. We are going to see the Prince’s Palace and the Casino de Monte-Carlo. Residents are not allowed into the casino. It is only for tourists. We are also going to visit the Oceanographic Museum by the sea. My friend says, “We are going to eat at a good restaurant.” I look at the prices. In Monaco everything is expensive. Very, very expensive.

The method

How a lesson works.

Most courses give you the rule first and the example second. We teach you the context first, explain the rule, and help you practice it.

1. Encounter it in context

Each lesson opens with a passage: a scene, a piece of history, a practical exchange. It arrives with a translation and the vocabulary it uses. You read it for meaning first.

2. See the rule made explicit

One grammar point per passage, explained in ordinary language, using the sentence you have just read as the example.

French · Passage 1 Bonjour

Je parle français. Tu parles anglais.

I speak French. You speak English.

The rule behind it

Present tense -er verbs, with je and tu

Most French verbs end in -er, like parler (to speak). Drop the -er to get the stem parl, then add the ending for the subject: -e for je, -es for tu. Parle and parles sound the same because the final s is silent.

3. Drill it until it is active

Reading a form is easier than producing one, so the drills make you produce it. They are generated from the same grammar and vocabulary as the passage, in four formats.

Nous ________ le journal tous les matins.

lisons lisez lit lisent

4. Retain it through spaced repetition

Every grammar topic and every notecard returns right when you are about to forget it. You no longer need to choose what to review because we show you the optimal drill or notecard right when you need to see it.

What you read

What the passages are about.

The passages are cultural and practical, and they grow in difficulty across the course. The caves at Lascaux, a trip to Monaco, the theft of the Mona Lisa, or the morning the Allies landed in Normandy. By the end, they are full paragraphs.

  • Passage 140: La grotte de Lascaux. In 1940 four boys and a dog go looking for treasure and find paintings twenty thousand years old.
  • Passage 145: Le vol de la Joconde. In 1911 a man walks into the Louvre on a Monday morning and walks out with the Mona Lisa. It stays in a small apartment for two years.
  • Passages 298 to 300: L'attente, Le débarquement, La libération. A three-part story about the liberation of Sainte-Mère-Église in the days after D-Day, June 1944. A coded line on Radio Londres, a sky full of planes, and an American soldier who leaves behind a photograph of his family in Pennsylvania.
  • Passage 330: Le 14 juillet. The last passage. 14 July 1789, and Antoine, a baker's apprentice, follows the crowd to the Bastille with flour still on his apron. Told in the present tense, as though you were standing in it.

Why Château

Compared with the alternatives.

Better than a language app

The gamified apps do not teach grammar explicitly, do not teach the language in the context of its surrounding culture, and do not have a real review schedule. Château combines all three in one curriculum, and each pillar reinforces the others. Without passages, grammar, and review together, learning a language is slow and ineffective.

Better than a textbook

A textbook has no audio and no drills, and it cannot track what you have forgotten.

A fraction of the cost of a tutor or a language school

A tutor or a language school is excellent and expensive, but neither builds in the structured review you still have to do on your own time.

Course

The course.

French

Beginner to high intermediate
  • Passages running from your first sentence to extended narrative prose, each with a translation, its vocabulary, and the grammar point it was written to teach.
  • Read about the caves at Lascaux, the theft of the Mona Lisa, and the morning the Allies landed in Normandy.
  • Spaced repetition notecards and a grammar reference you can consult at any time.
  • We add more content every month.