The hook under the c changes the sound. The date under the number changes the claim.

The one number anyone publishes, and what it is for

There is exactly one attributable published figure about how long French takes, and it describes American diplomats rather than you. The US Foreign Service Institute places French in Category I — its band for languages close to English — and lists it at 30 weeks, inside a range the same page gives as 24 to 30 weeks, or 552 to 690 class hours, read from the State Department's own site on 24 September 2026.

The comparison is the useful part. Category II is about 828 class hours and contains German; Category III is about 1,012; and Category IV, the hardest band, is 2,200 hours. Set against those, French is cheap. Set against the other languages in its own category — Dutch and Italian at 24 weeks — it is not, and the six-week gap is a clue about where the difficulty actually hides.

What the figure cannot do is tell you how many evenings anything takes. The FSI's students study around forty hours a week with instructors, aiming at a professional working standard, and the page itself says the real time varies with aptitude and prior experience. Nothing on this site multiplies that out into a personal timeline, because nobody publishes the conversion and inventing one would be the easiest lie in the subject.

What this notebook will not do

It will not tell you that you can be fluent in French in a given number of months. No certifying body, government or school publishes such a figure for a self-taught adult, and a page that supplies one has made it up.

It will not print a commission rate, a cookie window or an affiliate network for any product named here. For most of the companies on these pages, the only available figures come from affiliate directories that contradict each other about basic facts, and repeating them would dress up a guess as research.

And it will not score anything out of ten. Scoring implies testing, this site has run no controlled trial of a language course, and a number invented to look rigorous is worse than an argument you can check. What you get instead is what each product is built to do, what it costs on the day it was read, and which of French's four costs it addresses.

What it does instead

Every figure here carries two things: the document it came from and the date it was read. Where a vendor would not show a price — and on the day these pages were written, one published none to a plain request and two refused to show US dollars at all — that is stated as what happened rather than filled in from somewhere else.

The free option is named on every page where it is the honest answer, and it is said plainly that it pays nothing. For French that is not a gesture: the best listening resource available at any price is published free by a public broadcaster, and it is better matched to the language's hardest problem than anything on sale.