Learn French A2 Everyday Vocabulary: 300 Spoken Words, Fragments and Traps to Fix

Deck EN3816 — French Vocabulary A2: Everyday has 300 cards, English front, French back. Despite the "everyday" label, it is a spoken-French frequency list lifted from film subtitles: tuer, sang, police, capitaine, guerre and merde sit next to famille and demain. That makes it excellent for understanding real dialogue — as long as you fix three things the list does on its own.

Eight cards from the deck

What you'll learn

People and places: fils, frère, mari, enfants, bébé, garçon, filles, femmes, hommes, ami/amis, chef, docteur, capitaine, ville, pays, école, bureau, chambre, endroit. Time: aujourd'hui, demain, hier, matin, journée, semaine, mois, longtemps, bientôt, tard. Spoken glue: hein, euh, hé, tiens, vas-y, allons, voici, plutôt, presque, exactement, ainsi. Slang register: mec, gars, type, truc, boulot. And a lot of verb forms: aurais, serait, pourrait, devrais, aimerais, dirait, pensais, savais, étaient, pu, dû, pris, venu, tué.

Start at the end: cards 270–300

The last 31 cards are the true top of the frequency list — de, un, c', l', ne, ça, qui, dans, bien, suis, ai, va, comme, veux, peux, alors, aussi. They cover a huge share of every sentence you will hear. Move them to the front of your queue and learn them before card 1.

Three fixes worth making

1. Glue the fragments back on. Several backs are half an expression: plaît is useless without s'il vous plaît, revoir without au revoir, propos without à propos, jusqu' without jusqu'à. Rewrite those backs as the full phrase. The same goes for the elided c', l', s': add an example (c'est, l'eau, s'appelle).

2. Split the traps the deck creates. Card 37 gives voiture for "car", card 100 gives car for "because"; card 9 gives fils for "son", card 295 gives son for "his/her". Put a short example in the hint of each (car il pleut, son frère) so the French word never gets filed under the wrong English one. Card 273 "has/to → a" merges a (has) and à (to) — they are different words; split it into two cards.

3. Group the verb forms. About nine cards are forms of avoir (ai, as, a, avez, aura, aurais, ait, avez-vous, a-t-il), and pouvoir, savoir and être each get four or five. Review them as one table per verb instead of loose cards.

Nouns come with no article, so you have to look up the gender of porte, main, eau or fin yourself. Write la porte, la main, l'eau (f) on the back. Suspend cards 160 (dr), 182 (mme) and 261 (ii). They are subtitle abbreviations, not vocabulary.

Where it fits

EN3816 is the A2 step of the same subtitle-based series as the B1 deck covered in our guide to French Vocabulary B1. Finish this one first. Find deck EN3816 in the library at flip-it.app.