Who pays for this site
Cedilla Notes earns from a small number of partner links to language products. This page says which, what that does and does not change, and — more usefully — lists the things we have refused to do even though they would pay.
The arrangement, in plain terms
A handful of links on this site go to companies that sell French courses and lessons. If you follow one and buy something, they may pay us a share of what you spent. You are not charged differently for arriving through such a link — the price on the vendor's checkout is the price either way.
Those links all take the same form. They begin /go/, they are marked as sponsored to search engines, and there is a note beside each one saying it is a partner link, in the paragraph where it sits rather than at the bottom of the page. If a link is not marked, it is not a partner link.
The companies currently in that arrangement are Babbel, Rocket Languages, Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, Lingoda, italki and Preply. No programme has yet been approved for this site specifically, which means that at the moment every one of those links goes to the company's ordinary home page and earns nothing at all.
The things we recommend that pay us nothing
This is the part worth reading, because it is where the incentive and the advice pull in opposite directions.
The single most useful French resource named anywhere on this site is a daily news bulletin in slowed French with a transcript, published by RFI, a public broadcaster. It pays us nothing, it never will, and it is better matched to the hardest part of French than any product we could sell you. It is recommended on every page where listening comes up.
Duolingo runs no affiliate programme of any kind. Nobody earns a commission from recommending it, which is a fact worth carrying with you when you read anyone's ranked list of language apps — including lists that place it at the bottom. Its free tier is a reasonable answer for a beginner and this site says so.
Your public library may license a paid language service you can use free with a card. We have no relationship with any library and no way to earn from one. It is still the first thing worth checking.
And reading French articles in a field you already know is free, needs no product, and is the fastest early win in the language for an English speaker. There is nothing to sell there either.
Figures we will not print, and why
We publish no commission rate, no cookie duration and no affiliate network for any company named on this site. That is a deliberate rule rather than an omission.
For five of the seven companies above, the only terms available to us come from third-party affiliate directories, and those directories openly contradict one another about which network a programme even runs on. Printing a number from one of them would present a guess with the surface texture of research, which is the specific failure this whole site is organised against.
We also publish no score out of ten for any course, and no pass rate, fluency timeline or outcome figure for any learner. We have run no controlled trial, no certifying body publishes hours-to-fluency for self-taught adults, and the only published difficulty figure that exists — the US Foreign Service Institute's — measures full-time government students reaching a professional standard, which is quoted with those qualifiers attached wherever it appears.
What we turned down
No coupon or promotional-code pages. Discount-code pages are among the most profitable things an affiliate site can publish and they are almost always thin, they go stale within weeks, and in several programmes an unapproved code voids the sale for the buyer. There are none here and there will not be.
No price invented in place of one we could not read. On 24 September 2026, Babbel's pricing page returned no price to a plain request because it assembles its figures in the browser. We could have repeated a number from any of a hundred review sites. Instead the pages say that Babbel's price was not published to us, and tell you to read it off the checkout in your own currency. The same applies to two vendors that served us euros and Brazilian reais when asked in US English — the pages report what was actually served, in the currency it was served in.
No claims about resources we could not reach. TV5Monde's learning site and France Éducation international both refused our requests on that date. Both appear on essentially every list of free French resources, and both would have been easy to describe from memory. Neither is described here, and the pages say why.
No exam facts from anywhere but the issuing body. Because France Éducation international's pages could not be read, this site states no DELF or DALF fee, format or eligibility rule anywhere.
What the arrangement does not change
Nothing on this site is ordered by what it pays. The comparisons are arranged by which of French's costs a product addresses, and the free option appears in the same lists as the paid ones, identified as free.
The most direct evidence for that is the arithmetic on the money page. Rocket Languages is a partner, and the page works out from Rocket's own two published numbers that its bundles carry no discount whatsoever and that each additional level costs slightly more per hour of material than the one before it. That is not a criticism of the company and it is not flattering either — it is what its figures say, and a site that only published the flattering half would not be worth reading.
If you would rather not use a partner link
Type the company's name into a search engine and go there directly. Nothing about this site's advice depends on your using our links, and none of the pages will behave differently.
If something here is wrong — a price that has changed, a claim that has gone stale, a figure that does not match the source we cite — the contact page explains what to send. Corrections are the only editorial process this site has, and pointing out a mistake in something we were paid to link to is the most useful kind.