Learn French with a teacher who actually lives in France

A great many French teachers online do not live in France, and it shows in one specific place: register. They can teach you grammar perfectly well. What they cannot give you is what people are actually saying this year, in shops, at work, between friends — because that changes, and you only know it if you are in it. I teach from the the South of France, one to one, A1 to B2. A first lesson is thirty minutes for €20.

What being here actually changes

Not the grammar — the grammar is the same everywhere. What living here changes is everything that has a shelf life: which expressions are current, which are ten years stale, what a sentence signals about you socially, and the enormous gap between the French in a textbook and the French at a counter on a Tuesday.

Here is that gap in one word. The Académie française lists du coup in Dire, ne pas dire — its published record of usages it considers wrong — and holds that using it to mean donc is an abuse of the language. It is also said several times an hour by more or less everyone in France under fifty. A teacher who takes the Académie's side will have you speaking French nobody uses; a teacher who has never heard of the ruling cannot tell you which rooms it is fine in. Knowing both is the job, and it needs somebody who is actually here.

• Current, not archivedLanguage moves. A teacher who left ten years ago is teaching the French of ten years ago, confidently, with no way of knowing.
• Register, which is mostly invisibleNot what a word means — who says it, to whom, and what happens if you use it with the wrong person. This is the hardest thing to learn abroad and the easiest to absorb here.
• The France that is not ParisI am in the south. Accents differ, rhythm differs, and knowing that a Marseillais and a Lillois do not sound alike is part of understanding the country rather than a postcard of it.
• Real material, without translationWhat was on the radio, what the argument in the news actually is. Not a textbook's idea of a French conversation.

“Native speaker” is not the same claim

Being a native speaker means you can speak French. It does not mean you can teach it, and it does not mean you know what your language is doing right now. Those are three separate things, and the platforms sell the first as though it were all three.

I am French, I have taught privately for more than ten years, and I live in France. Those are four claims and they are worth checking separately — of the four, the one that most teachers online cannot make is the last, and it is the one that shapes what you will actually be able to say to a French person.

Will I pick up your accent?

A little, and it does not matter. There is no neutral French any more than there is neutral English — a Parisian, a Toulousain and a Belgian are all speaking French, and every one of them will understand you. What matters is being understood, and being able to understand back when the person in front of you does not sound like a recording.

The scale of that is easy to underestimate. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie counted 396 million French speakers in its March 2026 report, up from 321 million four years earlier, with close to 65% of them in Africa — which makes French the fourth most spoken language in the world, behind English, Mandarin and Spanish. Almost none of those people sound like the recording in a textbook, and the accent you will meet most often is not the one you were taught with.

If anything, being taught by someone in the south is useful preparation: you get used to the idea that French has more than one shape early, rather than being surprised by it the first time you leave the arrondissement you learned from.

What the lessons are like

One to one, online, and built around real material rather than a syllabus. Beginners work in thirty minutes twice a week; at the plateau it is a full hour, because the work is sustained listening at real speed. Teaching is in French and in English, as much English as you need at the start and less every month.

1. We find out where you actually areTen minutes of you talking beats any placement test.
2. We work on something realA film scene, an article, a conversation you need to be able to have.
3. You leave with a short listWhat I wrote down while you spoke. Specific, and shorter than people fear.

What it costs

€60 an hour, VAT included, with no platform commission. 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.

Five hours is €270 and ten is €510. Prices are final — VAT included, nothing added at checkout.

Questions people ask about this

What my hours are in your time zone · See also: the mistakes English speakers make · breaking the plateau if you understand French but freeze speaking it · starting from zero · a day in Paris, hour by hour · French films worth watching.