Learning to Speak French When I first had an inkling that I might move to France, I began studying French on Duolingo, a free online app. My discipline involved 20 minutes of study a day, although some days I studied longer because I was engrossed in the exercises. When I arrived in France in July 2021, I could read-at best—somewhere around the level of a first grader. But I understood very little of the spoken word. The main difficulty was that the written word bore little resemblance to the sound of the spoken word. And even worse, in French, the