Memorize 378 French Travel and Daily Life Flashcards: Survival Phrases, Home Vocabulary and Numbers

French feels friendly until you are stuck at a gare with a dying phone and no way to ask which quai your train leaves from. Deck PE8514 — French Travel & Daily Life (378 cards) is built for that moment — but it is really three decks glued together, and spotting the seams is what makes it fast.

What is actually inside the 378 cards

• Cards 1–200 — survival phrasebook. Greetings and courtesy (bonjour, au revoir, s'il vous plaît, merci, excusez-moi), emergencies (au secours, j'ai besoin d'aide, je suis perdu(e), urgence, pharmacie, médecin), transport (gare, quai, billet, vol, douane, bagages, arrêt de bus, métro), hotel (chambre simple, chambre double, clé, réception, climatisation), restaurant (addition, serveur, menu, végétarien, délicieux), money (taux de change, carte de crédit, argent liquide, distributeur automatique, réduction), sightseeing (musée, cathédrale, château, plage, montagne), directions, days, months.
• Cards 201–319 — the home. Rooms (salon, salle à manger, sous-sol, grenier, balcon), furniture (canapé, armoire, étagère, rideau, oreiller, drap), appliances (lave-vaisselle, sèche-linge, four, micro-ondes, aspirateur, fer à repasser), kitchen (casserole, poêle, bouilloire, assiette, fourchette, cuillère), chores (ranger, balayer, repasser, réparer, passer l'aspirateur).
• Cards 320–378 — numbers and colours. Digits 0 to 21, tens to 1 000 000, ordinals (premier, deuxième, quatrième, dixième), eleven colours, and the regional forms septante / huitante / nonante.

Eight cards from the deck

Fix four things before your first review

1. Add the article to every noun. The backs are bare — eau, pain, sol, étagère, grenier, poêle — with no gender, which is half-learned vocabulary. Rewrite them as le grenier, l'étagère (f.), la poêle. It matters most here: la poêle is a frying pan, le poêle is a wood stove.

2. Two cards are Quebec French, not Paris French. "Good morning → Bon matin" is a calque nobody says in France (say bonjour), and fin de semaine for weekend is Quebec too. One correction in the same block: Belgians do say septante and nonante, but quatre-vingts, never octante; huitante lives in Vaud, Valais and Fribourg.

3. Delete the two broken cards. Card 219 reads "elevatora → ascenseura" and card 220 is literally "qsqd → qsd". Fix the first to ascenseur, delete the second.

4. Suspend the first number block. Cards 67–82 teach un through mille in words; cards 320–355 teach the same values from digits, plus 11–19, 21 and the regional forms. Keep the digit block and suspend the other, or sixteen cards inflate your progress for free.

Two last traps: tiède (card 314, glossed "warm") means lukewarm — warm food is chaud; and asking for the salle de bain in a café gets a confused look, because the room you want is les toilettes.

How to run it

Treat the seams as deck boundaries: week one, cards 1–200 in the FR→EN direction so you recognise signs and station announcements; week two, the home block, glossing genders as you go; week three, numbers and colours out loud, because prices are heard, not read.

Twenty cards are spelled identically in both languages (restaurant, taxi, menu, police, visa, train, village, photo, garage, thermostat, orange, six…). They look free; what is left to learn is the gender and the pronunciation, so say them aloud instead of clicking through.

More French from the same library: French business and medical vocabulary.

Deck PE8514 — French Travel & Daily Life is in the library on Flip It; search the code once you are logged in.