What are the best places to study abroad and learn french for beginners/intermediates. I am thinking of taking a gap year before college to learn French, and am curious as to what the best programs are. I’ll have a little bit of French experience, but not a ton. Best cost effective? Best overall program? Best program for beginners? Any help will be appreciated, thank you.
Perhaps take a summer Intensive program (the most famous one is at Middlebury, but there’s a less selective one at Penn State plus Concordia villages in MN).
The best way to learn is for you to enroll in a French lycée or a Quebec Cégep, taking classes in French, but you do need to know some French. Otherwise look at the French for internationals programs at Laval, Université de Montréal…
The Sorbonne Foundation has a number of intensive French courses, ranging from one month to three months immersion (you can add time, if you choose) The prices are reasonable, generally less expensive that USA, and are situationed in the heart of Paris!
https://www.ccfs-sorbonne.fr/ and https://www.ccfs-sorbonne.fr/product/francais-intensif/
Those classes are good but there’s no guaranteed housing/dorm that I know of and for an 18 year old being in a capital with no housing and few usable speaking skills … 
They do have ‘flatshares’ but handling apartment living in a foreign country might be more suitable for a college graduate.
For a high school student there should be as much support (dorm, host family) as possible and it’s difficult to find.
@MYOS1634 The program will assist with housing, visas etc. I agree, it is not for every HS graduate, but, IMO, there is nothing better than being thrown to the lions (for some, incl. my 18yo DS who is currently on Gap Year)
There are French intensive courses in Canada which are very good and very reasonably priced. You will have the advantage that there are French speaking people in the area, and that if you are from the US then travel is less expensive compared to Europe.
I am familiar with classes at Université Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia, and at Université de Moncton in New Brunswick. Moncton is a bit easier to get to. Both are French speaking universities. There are also classes in Quebec City and in Montreal, and probably in other places in Canada.
The courses that we have looked into will test you the first day to determine how much French you currently know. They can deal with students anywhere from straight beginners to quite advanced. Then you have classes in the morning (tailored to your ability), and activities in the afternoon (for everyone). The first day they explain the rules in English, and then you speak nothing other than French for the entire program (including activities). Some activities are ones that you can participate in with very little knowledge of French (such as playing le soccer).
One advantage of the courses in Canada is that you will be in an area where there are more native French speaking people than there would be in Middlebury. Thus for example you can visit a market where the people running the market are French speaking. Another advantage is likely to be cost.
A 5 week intensive course will not get you anywhere near fluent. However, it might be a very good start prior to spending the year in a location where you need to use French exclusively.
For an 18 year old beginner, living in a family or a form and having a structured environment abroad is important (attending school).
I guess ‘thrown to the lions’ sounds very risky to me but it all depends what you mean 
My answer differs depending on what your status is regarding college. If you applied early, have been accepted, and know where you are going to study the following year, you can ask to defer your entry for a gap year (most schools will let you do that). You would have to check what the school’s policy is with respect to taking college classes for credit at other institutions during your gap year. Many do not allow you to do that.
If you haven’t yet applied and plan to do so next year, you need to be very careful to check what various university policies are about non-dual enrollment college classes. Some colleges and universities would automatically consider you a transfer student rather than a freshman – even if you’ve only taken a single class. This, in turn, might preclude your ability to be considered for freshman scholarships. (The University of California is particularly stringent – they only accepts junior year transfers, so taking a single class will preclude your being able to apply until you’ve racked up 60 semester or 90 quarter units…some private schools will let you have up to take one semester’s worth of classes and still apply as a freshman).
All this to say, be careful if you take college classes.
You’ve already gotten some good suggestions. There are no shortage of “gap year” programs that include language learning.
If taking college classes is a possibility, the American University of Paris can probably set you up with a home stay, as would schools like the Institut Américain Universitaire in or the CEA program Aix en Provence. Or you can do a direct enroll as a visiting student at a number of public or private universities. You might want to see about enrolling in a French University and arranging your own homestay. There are lots of options. I would pick a smaller city than Paris, unless you want a big city experience with all that entails.
If you don’t want to (or can’t) take an accredited class for reasons described about, there are a bunch of small language schools with full and half-day programs in Montpellier in the south of France that can also arrange home stays or housing. Montpellier is a lovely small-ish city with a lot of students who go for language study and or are students at the University or the Medical School.
Lots of choices. Good luck!
Yeah I think if you really work hard and put in a lot of effort, a summer can be a good amount of time to get a grasp of a language. A whole year might be too long.