If you understand French but freeze when you have to speak it, you do not have a vocabulary problem. You have a speed problem and a register problem. These are one-to-one conversation lessons with a French teacher in France, sixty minutes at a time, built around the two things that actually keep people stuck: hearing French at the pace it is really spoken, and knowing which words belong in which room. A first lesson is thirty minutes for €20.
Understanding is recognition; speaking is retrieval, and they are different skills that get practised at very different rates. Reading and listening let you meet a word a hundred times without ever producing it. Then someone asks you a question and you discover that recognising peut-être and reaching for it under time pressure are not the same thing at all.
Almost everyone who arrives at this plateau has done the same thing: years of input, very little output. That is not a mistake — input is how you got here — but it has a ceiling, and you have hit it. The way past it is uncomfortable and simple: produce French, badly, in front of someone who can hear exactly where it breaks and tell you why.
This is not a private theory. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, published by the Council of Europe and the source of the A1-to-C2 levels everyone quotes, scores reception (listening and reading) and production (spoken production, spoken interaction, writing) on separate scales — precisely because a learner is routinely several levels apart on them. Being B1 in your ears and A2 in your mouth is not a personal failing; it is the normal shape of the thing, and the framework was built to describe it.
French sounds fast because the words are connected, not because they are rushed. A native speaker is not moving their mouth quicker than you — they are running syllables together across word boundaries, and dropping sounds you were taught to expect. Once you know where the joins are, the same recording slows down without anyone changing speed.
This is the single most reassuring thing I get to tell people at this level, because it turns an impossible problem into a learnable one. You are not too slow. You are listening for the wrong shape.
| What you were taught | What you will hear | What is going on |
|---|---|---|
| Il y a | “ya” | Three words, one sound |
| Je ne sais pas | “chais pas” | The ne is gone in speech |
| Tu as | “t'as” | Contracted, constantly |
| Qu'est-ce que c'est | “kess-kuh-sé” | One block, not four words |
| Il faut que tu | “ifo-k'tu” | Two syllables of it simply disappear |
Register is the part no textbook teaches and no app can, because it is not about meaning — it is about who says a thing, to whom, and what happens if you get it wrong. Grave means “totally” and is fine with friends and career-limiting in a meeting — one of the mistakes English speakers make most reliably. Du coup is said constantly by everyone under fifty and taught almost nowhere.
This is where being taught by someone who actually lives in France stops being a nice detail and starts being the whole point. I hear these mistakes every week, from people whose grammar is better than mine, and none of them are in a book.
Sixty minutes of you talking, interrupted precisely. Not a lecture, and not a free-form chat that leaves you exactly where you started. The material is real — a film scene, an article, an argument about something you care about — and the corrections come in two flavours: the ones that stop the conversation, and the ones I write down and give you at the end.
Anyone who answers that in weeks is guessing. What I can say is what changes first and in what order, because it is the same for almost everyone: the freezing goes before the accuracy does, and people notice they have stopped translating some weeks before they notice they are speaking well.
The people who move fastest at this level are the ones who speak twice a week rather than once, and who are willing to be wrong out loud. That is the whole method. It is not complicated; it is just uncomfortable, and it works.
€60 an hour, VAT included, with no platform taking a third of it. A first lesson is thirty minutes for €20, credited against a package if you carry on. Nothing renews and there is no account to create.
Ten hours is €510 — €51 each. Prices are final: VAT included, nothing added at checkout.
“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.”
“His teaching style makes learning so effective and enjoyable. Looking forward to continuing and improving my French level.”
“Everything is going well, and I really like the tutor. I'm happy with the results.”
Come from a language app? · See also: a day in Paris, hour by hour — the same method told as a story · starting from absolute zero if you are not at this level yet · the blog, on the French people actually speak.