abefroman99

Where is the best place for French lessons online?

Preferable something with regular group as well as private lessons.

Tamino

I might suggest the BBC.

stimpy

My recommendation for any language is to start out with simple polite phrases and basic things you need to know when you first arrive in country. The rest you should learn while there, surrounded by people speaking that language. I never took a single class online or otherwise in French, yet I speak French well enough and understand nearly 100% spoken French. I just learned by listening and talking and occasionally glancing at a dictionary or Google Translate on my phone. But mainly I learned by being in France surrounded by French speakers. Whatever you do, while in France do not resort to speaking English and hoping someone will understand. Force yourself to speak entirely in French. It's difficult at first, but you will learn very quickly this way. The desire to communicate is a strong force.

Most any online tool will speak out the phrases to you so you can hear how they are pronounced. Even Google Translate can do this. Travlang.com is another good site for this.

NickB

Sure, one can always learn a language by just immersing oneself in it (although there are some people who can spend a lifetime in a country and still struggle with the local language). The point of formal language tuition, though, is to speed that process up.

stimpy

That too, language tuition, works for some people and doesn't work for others. In fact most teenagers who take around 3 years of French study at school, can't communicate at all once they arrive in France for an exchange program. However after about 6 weeks in France they are communicating very well.

NickB

While there will always be exceptions, you will find that those teenagers who have studied French may struggle to communicate when they first arrive. However, they will develop their French much faster and with greater vocabulary and more structurally and grammatically correct sentences than their counterparts who have zero knowledge of the language to build up from.

People who learn "sur le tas" are also more prone to develop bad habits that they struggle to get rid of (although admittedly it can also happen to all self-learners). My grandmother, for instance, despite living in France for decades, could not get rid of some of her germanisms, the most caricatural of which was: "il se donne" instead of "il y a" to mean "there is" (cf: "es gibt" in German).

stimpy

I have found, monitoring and helping over a thousand teenagers who come to study in France, that the education they get at home rarely helps nor matters. Especially kids from far away places. The best I've seen was an Italian girl who arrived pretty much ready to go. But we've had loads of south and central american Spanish and Portuguese speakers who really had to start from scratch. Ditto for Asians, Slavic speakers, etc. Americans are often the worst. In fact it is the exception rather than the rule that French language education in foreign schools results in a student who is advanced and ready to advance further on track.

NickB

I cannot help but notice that the countries you mention are notorious for woeful foreign language teaching and/or are also countries where French would not be studied at school except by a small minority. In slavonic countries, for instance, most kids would study English and then German and French would come a long, long way behind.
It seems to me that your experience is more reflective of the quality and quantity of French language learning in those countries than of the value of formal language learning per se. I suspect that if you looked at countries where foreign language learning is given more emphasis in the schooling system, such as Northern Europe, you would get a very different picture.
If formal training did not matter, then you would expect not to see much difference between countries which put emphasis on language in their education and those that do not. IME, there is a marked difference between, say, your average German, Dutch or Belgian teenager and your average Portuguese, American or Bulgarian teenager. Quality language education does make a massive amount of difference, ime.

Mountain Trader

I think immersion is the best way to learn a language.

That said, this is an English language website, frequented mostly by Anglophiles. Most of them are like the OP may be-they don't have months on end to surround themselves in a locality filled with French speaking people.

That may be why the OP asked about online resources, and not about what is the best way to learn French.

stimpy

You are right and that's why I made my original response in post #3. There's no point IMO in trying to learn more than the basic polite phrases, numbers and things you will need as a tourist or business visitor. Assuming the OP is only visiting for a week or two, these phrases will help immensely as politeness is very important here. Once you've said a few opening phrases such as the mandatory bon jour, you can politely ask if you could pose a question in English.

If on the other hand the OP wants to learn French because he is going to move here as an expat (we do have a lot of expats here on Flyertalk), then perhaps some more learning would be helpful. If you want to take a more advanced class while in your home country, I recommend spending some time each week speaking with a French native speaker in person or by phone so they can tell you if you are advancing in the right direction or wasting your time.

BadgerBoi

OP, to get back to what you are actually asking, I have heard from friends that the Pimsleur method is very good. I haven't used it myself, and I doubt that group sessions are available, but it's probably worth having a look at.

No doubt others will tell me that I'm completely wrong in even suggesting this, but everybody learns differently. Good luck, French is a beautiful language and I hope you enjoy learning it.

Nanook

There's always Babbel, which I paid for to learn some basic phrases in Italian. But you can get lessons on Apple podcasts, too. Also, via BBC as an earlier poster mentioned.

gardengirl

This is my favorite. My son traveled many countries and recommended it after seeing different language processes.

MSPeconomist

Some cities have an Alliance Francais that provices cultural activities as well as some language courses.