Numbers zero to twenty

Numbers arrive before almost anything else, because the first genuinely useful French you will hear spoken at you is a room, a platform, a bus or a price. And numbers fail in a particular way in a second language: you can recite them faultlessly in order and still not catch douze when somebody says it once, at normal speed, in the middle of a sentence about something else.

So learn them in chunks — zero to five, six to ten, eleven to sixteen — and then notice that seventeen, eighteen and nineteen stop being new words at all and become dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf: ten and seven. Then train recognition separately from production. Hearing a number and writing the digit is a different skill from saying the list, and it is the one you will be using when a stranger tells you where your class is.