Private French · after the streak · A2 to B1

Learn French with a real teacher, not an app — when a year of streaks has not made you able to speak

An app taught you to recognise French. Speaking is a different skill, and recognition does not become production on its own. That is why a 400-day streak can leave you unable to order a coffee: you were practising the half of the language that happens when you have unlimited time and four options on screen. The half you are missing needs somebody on the other end, waiting.

If you have opened this page you probably feel slightly foolish, and you should not. You spent a year proving you want this. Most people who say they want to learn French do not open anything for 400 days running. The streak was not wasted — it is why the first lesson with me will not start at zero. It is just that the thing it built is a foundation, and you have been standing on it waiting for a house to appear.

What an app is genuinely good at, and what it structurally cannot do

An app is very good at recognition, vocabulary and habit — and cannot be good at production, timing or repair, because none of those exist without another person. This is not a flaw somebody could fix in the next version. It is what the format is.

What you need	An app	A person
Vocabulary you can recognise	Very good	Slower
A daily habit	Better than me	Twice a week at most
Saying it before you have planned it	Never asked of you	The entire lesson
Being interrupted and repaired	Impossible	The point
Knowing which register you are in	Not modelled	Constant
Hearing French at real speed	Recorded slowly	Unavoidable

Look at the first two rows before the others. They are real, and they are why I do not tell anybody to delete the app. If it is giving you a daily fifteen minutes I could never ask for, keep it. What I am offering is the row you cannot get from it — and the reason the streak stopped producing results around month four is that you had finished the part it could teach.

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.

Why the streak stops working, at about the same point for everybody

Recognition is a multiple-choice skill and production is a blank-page one. An app asks "which of these four means bread?" — a question that can only be asked once you have already been given the answer. Nobody in a bakery gives you four options.

You have the word, but not the road to itYou know pourtant when you see it. Retrieving it in 0.4 seconds while somebody waits is a different neural errand, and only gets built by doing exactly that, repeatedly, badly at first.
You have never been under time pressureEvery app answer is untimed. Real French happens at the speed of the other person's patience, which is short and cheerful and does not wait for you to conjugate.
Nothing has ever corrected the thing you cannot hearMost plateaus are two or three habits — a vowel, a rhythm, one tense used where French uses another. You cannot self-diagnose them, because to you they sound correct.
You have only heard French that was slowed down for youThen you meet a real sentence, which is joined rather than fast, and it lands as a single long word. That is a solvable problem and it is not a vocabulary problem.

What the first lesson does with a year of app French

Ten minutes of you talking, and I can tell you which two habits are costing you the most. Not a test — a conversation, which is the only assessment that measures the thing you actually want.

You will be further along than you think, and worse at one specific thing than you expect. Almost everyone who arrives from an app has the same shape: a genuinely useful vocabulary sitting behind a pronunciation habit or a rhythm problem that stops any of it coming out. Find that, and a year of quiet work suddenly becomes available to you. That is the most satisfying first lesson there is, and it happens most weeks.

Bring nothing. No revision, no preparation, and please do not cram the night before — I want to hear where you actually are, not where you can get to under exam conditions.

What it costs

A first lesson is €20 for thirty minutes — short and cheap on purpose, because deciding whether someone suits you should not cost much. After that an hour is €60, VAT included, with no platform taking a third of it.

Ten hours is €510, which is €51 each, and nothing expires — a lesson you have paid for stays yours until you take it. If you have been paying an app a subscription for a year, the comparison worth making is not price per month. It is what you could say out loud at the end of each.

Book a first lesson — €20 If you already know it's speaking

Credited against your first package · Keep the app if it's working

Ten at night on the quays. A year of the app happened in fifteen-minute pieces like this.

Questions people ask after a year of an app

Was the year wasted?

No, and this is the question everybody asks first. You built a vocabulary and a habit, which is the slow unglamorous part most learners never finish. You are not starting again — you are starting from a place a true beginner is nine months away from. What you are missing takes weeks, not another year.

Should I delete the app?

Not if it is still giving you a daily fifteen minutes. I cannot ask you for that and neither can any teacher. Keep it as the drill and let the lessons be the part it cannot do. The mistake is not using the app, it is expecting it to produce speech.

What level am I, really?

Usually A2 in recognition and A1 in speech, and the gap between those two numbers is the whole problem. Ten minutes of conversation in the first lesson tells us both, and it is a more accurate measure than any placement test — a test asks what you know, and knowing is not the thing you are short of.

I can read French but I panic when I have to speak. Is that normal?

It is the single most common thing I see, and the panic is not a character flaw — it is what happens when a skill has never been rehearsed under time pressure. It goes away by being rehearsed under time pressure, gently, with somebody who is not in a hurry. Nothing else fixes it.

How many lessons before I can hold a conversation?

Anyone who answers that in a number is guessing, and I would rather tell you that than sell you a promise. What I can say is what happens: the freeze goes before the fluency does, usually within the first handful of lessons, and it is the change students notice first.

Do I need to have finished a course first?

No. Complete beginners are very welcome and so is anyone at any point in between. There is no level at which a lesson stops being the right thing — there is only a level below which an app is the cheaper way to get the vocabulary, and if you have a streak you are already past it.

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

Svetlana

“Very patient, and takes time to explain minor grammar details, which I truly appreciate.”

Kelvin

“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

Next: French conversation practice if you already know speaking is the gap, or start from zero if the app never really took. Who is teaching.