Remember 360 B1 French Words: Verb Forms, Fillers and the Genders the Deck Leaves Out

Deck NP0334 — French Vocabulary B1: Expanding is 360 cards long, English on the front, French on the back. Read twenty cards and its origin is obvious: this is a frequency list pulled from subtitles, and the films were mostly crime films. Meurtre, arme, prison, agent, tirer, merde, cul all made the cut; the whole 360 contains exactly two numbers (quatre, six), no colours, no weekdays, no weather and almost no food. Study it for what it is — a list of the words people actually say out loud — and it works very well.

Nine cards from the deck

What the 360 cards actually contain

Spoken glue: voilà, bon, enfin, quand même-type adverbs, tellement, autant, tant, surtout, sinon, sauf, dès, pendant, depuis, partout, parfois, souvent, ensuite, vite, tôt. Conversation openers and softeners: salut, bonjour, bonsoir, pardon, madame, messieurs, chéri/chérie, dis-moi, laisse-moi, voulez-vous, puis-je. Everyday nouns: chambre, salle, pièce, lit, rue, chemin, route, café, verre, dîner, livre, carte, photo, film, musique, fête, soirée, chien, visage, bras, cœur, voix, rêve, secret, rendez-vous. Judgement adjectives: bizarre, drôle, génial, gentil, pauvre, heureux, content, malade, grave, faux, dur, pire, meilleur/meilleure. And a lot of verb morphology: past participles (eu, dû, venu, allé, appris, reçu, écrit, oublié), imperfects (étais, avais, faisait, voulais, pensais), futures (serai, ferai, fera, vont), conditionals (pourrais, devrais, serais, ferais) and subjunctives (soit, ait, puisse).

First move: collapse six verbs into six tables

Forty-two cards in this deck are inflected forms of just six verbs. Être alone gets eleven (êtes, étais, étiez, sommes, soit, sois, soyez, serai, serais, est-il, êtes-vous), pouvoir eight, devoir seven, faire six, avoir and aller five each. Reviewed as isolated cards they are noise — you learn serais without ever seeing where it sits in the conditional. Suspend the 42 and replace them with one table card per verb (present, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive, past participle). You cut a tenth of the deck and gain the pattern the deck was hiding.

Second move: put the expression back around the fragment

The extractor reduced multi-word expressions to a single token, so a dozen cards teach a French word that is almost never used alone. Accord is only "okay" inside d'accord; abord only means "first" inside d'abord; then à cause de, tout de suite, en effet, grâce à, au revoir, au courant, ça suffit, ne t'inquiète pas, près de, au-dessus. Rewrite each back as the full expression before your first review, or you will produce fragments no French speaker says.

Two smaller repairs while you are in there. Noun gender is never given, even though the deck carefully tags adjectives as feminine or masculine — add le/la to every noun. And three backs lost their diacritics: ecoute (card 305, while card 338 keeps écoutez), plait for plaît, coeur for cœur. The junk is easy to spot and delete: card 230 is "the → the", plus II, h, s, pos, and the corpus names John, Jack and Sam.

Keep the fillers, though — euh, ben, hein, hé, eh. No textbook teaches them and they are the difference between understanding a French film and missing half of it.

Deck NP0334 is in the Flip It library at flip-it.app.

Related: French travel and daily life — 378 flashcards (where the numbers and thematic vocabulary live) · French business and medical vocabulary · the Spanish B1 deck built by the same generator