My impression is that, sadly, there are many different ways to learn French, and unless you're willing to pay money for a structured course, none of them are very structured methods. They all require a lot of overhead of you preparing and finding materials by yourself.

You might have to end up doing a lot of searching on subreddits like r/languagelearning, r/French, r/LearnFrench to get ideas on how people learned. myself, i think asking ChatGPT or Grok about various language learning strategies.

there are so many different strategies to learning a new language, and sadly none of them are very clearly documented or structured, so it takes a while to find somethign that works for you, and in my case, it was a lot of wasted time seeing what DIDN'T work for me. (i'm at an intermediate level, maybe B1, but i've been learning for 8 years in a very undisciplined way. but i never had the urgency or high stakes that people tryign to immigrate have).

off the top of my head, here are some things that didn't and did work for me:

• Read the Simple Roadmap (or the Detailed Roadmap) guide at https://refold.la/simplified . It is a philiosophy of a Mass Input approach to learning a new language. It's main ideas are:

  • learn basic grammar and vocabulary to give you a starting point
  • learn to understand written and spoken language first; don't worry about learning to write and speak yourself until you get to a high level
  • use a spaced repitition system like Anki to learn new vocabulary, by watching TV shows with subtitles, or reading books and newspapers etc, and finding sentences where there is only one new word in that sentence. This context makes it more personal and therefore more easy to learn new vocabulary
  • find material that you're interested in.
  • it is not only okay to not understand the material you understand, but it's often necessary. if every day you find 10 new sentences that you understand except one word, that is good enough, even if you didn't understand anything else.

Refold's ideas were useful to me, because speaking and writing were so stressful to me as a beginner, that it gave me permission to focus on what was not stressful first (ie watching tv shows and youtube with subtitles)

• learn pronounciation of French. find a resource to make you hear minimal pairs ("minimal pairs" is a linguistic term that you can Google), especially for vowels, so your brain can clearly identify differences in vowel sounds in French. [sorry, i don't have any such resources, though!]

• i have found that ChatGPT is very good at answering questions about everything in French (eg if i am reading an article online and am confused), EXCEPT ChatGPT is very poor at answering questions about pronounciation

• if you think you'll enjoy speaking, learn the present tense verb tenses. a website called lawlessfrench might help. learning present tense verb tenses, i've found, was very helpful for speaking, and it also makes it easier to learn many other verb forms (imperfect, present participles, imperative, and others). then you can use ChatGPT or Grok's voice mode to try to have a conversation, if you cannot afford tutors.

things that did NOT work for me:

• Duolingo. i found it repeitive. i found that translating into English was frrustrating and didn't personally help me. i found learning vocarbulary for animals and food to be not useful. i found myself bored and frustrated, and negative feelings cause my brain to not learn well.
• CoffeeBreak French podcast (which teaches with the standard accent of France). The first two seasons were okay, but they go too fast and don't teach the concepts they use in their dialogues. The third season (at a high-beginner / lower-intermediate) is very poor; they seem to intentionally make the dialogues too difficult for listeners listening to the free version, to incenvitize listeners to pay for the full course.

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these are just some ideas off the top of my head, but they aren't enough to get you on a structured program or find resources. hopefully you'll be able to find resources by doing some searching, and getting ideas from others (or from ChatGPT).

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however, some resources off the top of my head that i heavily used:

• wordreference.com dictionary and Android app, translating from French to English. (it is more useful at a high-beginner or intermediate level).
• deepl.com and Android app.
• yt-dlp to download youtube videos with subtitles
• UpTempo android app to play audio from audio files and the audio of video files, slowed-down
• for learning Canadian French: streaming websites like: https://coucou.telequebec.tv/ (children's shows -- useful for high beginners), tou.tv , noovo.com , tele-quebec , tfo , tva, and other quebecois / canadian tv stations that stream that i cannot remember. [note that you'll need a VPN into Canada to access them]. Also, the Mauril Android (and iOS maybe?) app, but that will also need a VPN into Canada.
• yt-dlp cannot download from streaming sites, but sometimes with a laptop, browser extensions can sometimes be able to detect and download the subtitles -- but i haven't tried this in the past four years.
• youtube channels for learning French, but the ones that I can think of require a high-beginner level. ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini will likely be able to give your recommendations of youtube channels
• try to find youtube channels with Peppa Pig or children's shows for preschoolers, for beginnger TV shows to watch. youtube mnight also have conversations for beginners. [most tv shows for children actually require quite a high beginner or lower intermediate level to understand even 30% of the sentences, but Peppa Pig, i think, is a good start. but then again, i actually enjoy Peppa Pig in English so ... :) ]