French Language Course

French is a language where fluent reading and confident speaking often develop at very different speeds, and the gap comes down largely to phonetics. Written French keeps consonants that spoken French drops — a word like beaucoup or temps doesn't sound the way it looks on the page — and liaison rules, where a normally silent final consonant is pronounced because the next word starts with a vowel, as in les amis, are close to impossible to internalize from a textbook alone.

Nasal vowels are another sticking point: English doesn't distinguish sounds the way French does between, say, vin, vent, and vont, so many self-taught learners can read all three correctly but say them nearly identically out loud. A tutor listening in real time is really the only reliable way to close that gap.

Beyond pronunciation, sessions typically build through the core grammar that trips up English speakers specifically: gendered nouns and the agreement that follows from them throughout a sentence, the passé composé vs. imparfait split for narrating the past, and the formal/informal address distinction between tu and vous, which carries social implications English simply doesn't require you to think about.

Tutors also work on listening comprehension of natural speech, since French spoken at conversational speed tends to elide and contract far more than classroom audio typically does. If you're preparing for a specific certification like the DELF or DALF, or need French for a work or academic context, mention that when requesting a tutor so sessions can be weighted toward the register and vocabulary you'll actually need rather than general conversation practice.