I don’t often promote products and services on this blog – firstly because people don’t come here to read adverts, and will rush off elsewhere – and second, because there aren’t so many great products that are appropriate to our ‘typical readers’. But today I’m going to break with tradition.

You don’t need to switch off quite yet, because the product I’m going to show you is a ‘learn French online’ program, and it’s free to try – I’m pretty sure a lot of you will think it’s as impressive as I do. You might just thank me!

The biggest problem for both people living in France and those who like to holiday in France is surely the language. Learning French is difficult, and improving your French is always an ongoing challenge. This applies to almost every expat and tourist I can think of (certainly myself included). But there might just be a way to make learning French a bit easier!

Over the years I’ve tried everything – books, tapes, games, online courses, classroom type training, all with different degrees of success. The big problem with most of them is that they aren’t engaging enough, and after a week or a month it is difficult to remain motivated.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to take a look at a new online course, that uses videos for the language training. Not just boring videos though, they take real footage – news, music videos, interviews etc – in French, of course, and below the video they have the words written in both French and English, so you can listen, and read what you are hearing, at the same time.

Too fast? Slow it down. Missed a word? Rewind the video, over and over if necessary. Need more practice? Play one of the inbuilt games. Great stuff, I promise. And the videos are all rated 1-5 on a scale of difficulty, so you can dive right in at the appropriate level for you.

One thing that perhaps isn’t obvious from looking at the site – there are currently just over 100 videos in the ’subscibers’ version, so plenty to be going along with, and I understand that more are being added all the time.

Give it a go now at Yabla. Think I’m wrong to recommend it? Think it’s a great product? Whichever, leave your comments below, I’d be interested to see what anyone else thinks about it.