French reading practice: free texts by level, A1 to C1

French is easier to read than to hear. Out loud, il parle and ils parlent sound exactly the same. On the page, the plural is right there. Half the letters are silent and spoken words run together, but in writing they sit still and wait for you. Add the thousands of words English took from French, gouvernement, information, possible, and reading is the obvious way in.

So good French reading practice does two things. It gives you text at your level, and it lets you hear that same text once you can read it. Every site below was opened and checked in October 2026. Not sure of your level? The free French level test takes a few minutes.

A1 to A2: news written for French kids

1jour1actu (1jour1actu.com) is a news site for French schoolchildren. Each week there's a round-up of three stories, plus short explainers titled C'est quoi…?, "what is…?". When I checked, they covered cyberattacks, groundwater and the Nobel Prize.

The articles open without an account. They talk to the reader as tu and keep sentences short. Better still, they explain hard words inside the sentence: a story about a cave lion's skeleton says des spéléologues, des personnes qui explorent les galeries souterraines. The definition comes free, in French.

Don't worry that it's for children. The topics are real news. Only the French is simple.

A2 to B1: read it first, then hear it

Journal en français facile (francaisfacile.rfi.fr) is RFI's news bulletin in simpler French. Ten minutes of world news, Monday to Friday, posted with a full transcript. RFI's language team adds two exercises a week on one of the stories.

For a reader, this is the most useful free French resource there is, because it closes the gap between the page and the sound. Do it in three passes:

1. Read the transcript. Look up only what blocks you.
2. Play the audio and read along.
3. Play it again without the text.

By the third pass you hear words you could only read on the first.

B1: TV5Monde, sorted by level

TV5Monde Apprendre (apprendre.tv5monde.com) is free and sorted into A1, A2, B1 and B2. Each item is a short video with a set of exercises on vocabulary or grammar, on themes from food to geopolitics. It leans toward listening, but it's the best free bridge from French written for learners to French written for the French. It also has a 14-question test of your listening level.

B2: the free daily press

At B2, read what French people read. Two that are free and easy to get into:

• franceinfo (franceinfo.fr), public-service news. Live updates in short lines, plus longer explainers on the same stories.
• 20 Minutes (20minutes.fr), a free daily. Short pieces and lots of everyday news. Easier than most papers.

Le Monde and Le Figaro keep many of their articles for subscribers. You don't need them yet.

C1: novels, and a tense you've never heard

Open a French novel and you meet a tense nobody uses in conversation, the passé simple. Il fut, elle prit, ils répondirent. In speech that's il a été, elle a pris. Written stories still tell what happened in the passé simple. You only need to recognise it, mostly in the third person.

Wikisource (fr.wikisource.org) has over 529,000 free texts in French. Two good first classics:

• Jules Verne, Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. Plain storytelling and short chapters. Chapter one already has répondit and prit in it.
• Guy de Maupassant's short stories, like La Parure (1884). A few pages each, so you finish one in a sitting.

Looking words up in French

Three things trip people up.

Apostrophes and merged words. L'école, qu'il, j'ai: look up the part after the apostrophe. Du is de + le, au is à + le. A dictionary has homme, not l'homme.

Old irregular verbs. Dictionaries list the infinitive. Fit is from faire, vint from venir, eut from avoir, fut from être. Learn those four and most novels open up.

Ne … que. Il n'a que dix euros isn't a negative. It means he has only ten euros. When a "not" sentence makes no sense, look for que further along.

Past that, it's the usual choice. A dictionary tab next to the text, a pop-up that forgets the word once you close it, or a reader that keeps it.

Mossglen is that last kind (full disclosure: I build it). It's a free Chrome extension in the side panel. Tap a word on franceinfo and it's saved with its sentence, then brought back for review. It can also read the article aloud with the current sentence lit up, which is the RFI trick on any page you like. When a line like il ne savait guère stops making sense, ask Pip, the AI in the panel.

How much a day

At A2, one 1jour1actu story and one RFI transcript a day is plenty. Call it fifteen minutes. Pick texts where you know nearly every word: around 98% is the number that matters. If you stop every line, drop a level.

Learning another language too? There's Spanish reading practice and German reading practice, each with its own sources. Why reading works at all is in how to learn a language by reading.