Private French · For professionals · B1 and up

Business French lessons for professionals

Q: Can my employer pay?

The simplest way, and the one most people use: you book and pay, and I send you an invoice — VAT shown, itemised — which you put through expenses. That works today and needs nothing from me in advance. If your finance department insists on invoicing the company directly rather than reimbursing you, write to me first: it is a different kind of sale and I will need your company's VAT number to do it properly. If they require a specific reference or a purchase order number on the invoice, tell me before you book either way.

Q: What if I have to cancel or move a lesson?

Move it or cancel it up to 24 hours before it starts, and it costs you nothing. Inside 24 hours the lesson is due — with the exception you would expect: if you are ill, or something genuinely outside your control happens, we move it and that is the end of it.

Professional French is not a vocabulary problem. It is a register problem. You can know every word in an email and still send something that reads as curt, or as oddly deferential, with no way of telling which — because nobody at work will ever correct you. These are one-to-one lessons for meetings, email and the French that decides whether you are taken seriously. A first lesson is thirty minutes for €20.

★★★★★ 28 reviews· 4.8 average · 10+ years · native French

One to oneOnline, worldwide60 minB1 and up

Book your first lesson — €20 Bring a real email you were not sure about. That is the whole first lesson.

Why nobody tells you your French is wrong at work

Colleagues correct grammar and never correct register, because correcting register sounds like correcting someone's manners. So the mistakes that cost you socially are exactly the ones you never hear about. People will understand your email perfectly and form an impression of you from it that you cannot see.

It is worth knowing how far that reaches. French is one of the European Union's 24 official languages and one of only three procedural languages of the European Commission, with English and German — the ones the institutions actually run on day to day. At the United Nations it is one of six official languages and one of the two working languages of the Secretariat, which it has been since 1946, and it is the official language of the International Court of Justice. If your work touches Brussels, Geneva or an international body, professional French is not a courtesy.

This is the whole argument for working on professional French with a teacher rather than absorbing it. Absorption works for vocabulary. It does not work for the register you are already using confidently and wrongly, because there is no feedback loop.

Too casual, by accidentGrave, du coup, ça marche — natural with colleagues your own age, career-limiting in a message to a director.
Too formal, which reads as distantEnglish speakers overcorrect into French so ceremonial it puts a wall between you and the person you are trying to work with.
Directness that lands as rudenessA perfectly polite English request translated literally can arrive as an instruction. French softens more, and in specific places.
The closing formulaThe sign-off carries more social information than the rest of the email combined, and it is the part learners copy from whatever they saw last.

Have your French read properly — €20

Email: the highest-return thing to fix

You will write far more French than you speak, it is permanent, and it is forwarded. An email is the one piece of your French that people re-read and pass on, which makes it worth more attention than its share of your working day suggests.

Most of it is patterns rather than creativity. French professional email is more formulaic than English, which is good news: the formulas can be learned, and once you have four or five reliable ones you stop composing from scratch and start choosing.

What you want to say	What to write	Register
Could you send me…	Pourriez-vous m'envoyer…	Standard, safe anywhere
I'm following up	Je me permets de revenir vers vous	Polite chase, no reproach
As discussed	Comme convenu	Neutral, confirms an agreement
Sorry to bother you	Je vous prie de m'excuser pour le dérangement	Formal, to someone senior
Best regards	Cordialement	The everyday default. Bien à vous is warmer

Meetings, where the problem is speed

In a meeting the issue stops being what you can say and becomes when you can say it. By the time you have assembled a sentence the topic has moved. That is not a French problem — it is a retrieval-speed problem, and it is fixed by producing French under time pressure rather than by learning more of it.

The practical half of this is knowing the phrases that buy you the floor — je me permets d'intervenir, si je peux me permettre, juste un point. Two seconds of held attention is usually all you needed. It is also the same underlying skill as breaking the conversational plateau.

What the lessons are

Your material, not a textbook's. The emails you actually send, the meeting you have on Thursday, the presentation you have to give. Bring the real thing — anonymised if it needs to be — and we work on that, because generic business French is exactly the kind that gets learned and never used.

Bring something realAn email you were unsure about is the most useful possible first lesson.
We rewrite it togetherNot corrected — rewritten, with the reason for each change said out loud. The reason is the transferable part.
You rehearse the spoken versionMeetings, calls, the introduction you give ten times a year. Under time, until it stops being assembled.

What it costs

€60 an hour, VAT included, with no platform commission. A first lesson is thirty minutes for €20. Professional French usually works best as a full hour weekly, and packages of five or ten are the usual shape.

€20First lesson, 30 min

€60One hour

€270Five hours

Ten hours is €510 — €51 each. Prices are final: VAT included, nothing added at checkout. An itemised invoice with the VAT shown is issued for every purchase, which is usually what an employer needs to reimburse you.

Your first lesson is thirty minutes for €20. Short and cheap on purpose, and credited against your first package. That is the entire commitment — no subscription, no membership, nothing that renews.

Book a first lesson — €20

Au zinc after work, where the register changes completely and nobody tells you it has.

Questions professionals ask

Can my employer pay?

The simplest way, and the one most people use: you book and pay, and I send you an invoice — VAT shown, itemised — which you put through expenses. That works today and needs nothing from me in advance. If your finance department insists on invoicing the company directly rather than reimbursing you, write to me first: it is a different kind of sale and I will need your company's VAT number to do it properly. If they require a specific reference or a purchase order number on the invoice, tell me before you book either way.

Can we work on my actual emails and documents?

That is the most useful version of these lessons. Anonymise anything sensitive and bring the real thing — generic business French is the kind that gets learned and never used.

What level do I need?

B1 and up, realistically. B1 is the Council of Europe's threshold level on the Common European Framework — able to deal with most situations that come up and to produce connected speech on a familiar subject — and professional register only becomes the useful work once that is in place. Below it the useful work is general French, and I would rather tell you that than sell you the wrong course.

Can you help me prepare one specific meeting?

Yes, and it is one of the highest-value single lessons there is. Bring the agenda, the people, and what you need to come out of it with.

Do you teach industry vocabulary?

Where it matters, but it is rarely the bottleneck. You almost certainly know your field's words already — what is missing is the register around them.

What if I have to cancel or move a lesson?

Move it or cancel it up to 24 hours before it starts, and it costs you nothing. Inside 24 hours the lesson is due — with the exception you would expect: if you are ill, or something genuinely outside your control happens, we move it and that is the end of it.

“Prepared tutor who tailors the lesson to your level and to your goals. Pleasant to talk to… That's why I booked further lessons after the first.”

Edoardo

“Everything is going well, and I really like the tutor. I'm happy with the results.”

Svetlana

“Excellent teacher. A creative approach to lessons.”

Anna

Lessons before your working day · See also: conversation practice for the speed problem in meetings · the mistakes English speakers make · DELF preparation if you need the certificate as well as the French.