Hi everyone,
I’m looking to seriously learn French and would appreciate any recommendations for specific paid courses or websites that you’ve found particularly helpful. There are so many options out there, and I’d love to hear about any resources that stood out to you
I work from home, so I can commit few hours a day to learning. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. TIA! 
I have been using preply for language tutors and have found it to be extremely helpful in conversational french. You subscribe to a tutor to stay held accountable with booking lessons and all the tutors thus far have been extremely helpful.
Of all the paid sites I’ve used, Kwiziq was the most helpful for me. It focuses mostly on grammar, but it also has good listening practice at different levels.
I’ve learned a lot from Rocket Languages! Wait until it goes on sale to buy it tho
The best paid website for any language that has it is always by far “LingQ”. Its basically an ebook reader with a bunch of language learning features built in, the big one being instant one click word look up with crowd sourced defintions. Language learning is 90% reading and listening, Lingq simply makes those two things easier.
According to a study conducted by compare language apps (basically some organisation ran by some PHD to test language learning apps objectively), lingq is the single most effective language learning app: “13 hours on LingQ is equal to the first semester of college Spanish”. That sounds a lot more impressive than it is: traditional classroom language education is generally terrible. Its important to note the study also found that rosetta stone, mango lanuages had similar, although slightly worse, effectiveness. Another important thing to note is that duolingo, which people incessantly recommend for no good reason other than the fact its what they use, was found to be the least effective taking ~34 hours to teach as much as a college semester, meaning it is 2-3x less effective than Lingq, rosseta stone and mango languages: so yeah, stop using it and get something better.
Heres the study: The Results Are In: LingQ Ranks Highest in Effectiveness! – LingQ Blog
I recommend reading graded readers initially then advancing to real novels. The audiobooks that come with graded readers, the YouTube channel french comprehensible input and the podcast which you can listen along with transcript on lingq are all great listening resources.
Do you just read the graded readers under guided course inside LingQ?
Do you do the flashcards or anything else inside LingQ?
I just read books with lingq. Sometimes (although very rarely) I read news articles in it. The community uploaded content is great for improving your listening because it all has audio synced up to the transcript, but the books are all public domain books so I recommend uploading your own books your more likely to enjoy. You can find graded readers freely online and upload them to lingq, theres usually free samples of ones available on lingq. I dont use lingq flashcards feature, I’ve found reading to be more effective. I find it very hard to force a word into your brain using things like flashcards, its much easier to learn it by seeing it in context multiple different times. If you stick with lingq its the best language learning app hands down.