French Lessons

Lessons

Beginner

· 30 lessons

Greetings & Formality

French splits 'you' into tu (informal) and vous (formal) — a distinction English dropped centuries ago (English used to have thou/you, but thou died out). Start here before any other vocabulary, because it shapes every conversation you'll have.

Lesson 2A1

Alphabet & Pronunciation

French uses the same 26 letters as English, but adds accent marks that change pronunciation (and sometimes meaning), and it has a family of nasal vowels English simply doesn't have. Get comfortable with the sound system now — it pays off in every lesson after this one.

Lesson 3A1

Personal Pronouns & être / avoir

English speakers already say the subject pronoun every time ('I eat', never just 'Eat' to mean 'I eat'), so this habit transfers directly to French. The real work here is two irregular, high-frequency verbs — être (to be) and avoir (to have) — that simply have to be memorized.

Lesson 4A1

Articles & Gender

Every French noun is either masculine or feminine, and the article in front of it — le, la, un, une — is your main clue. English lost grammatical gender centuries ago (a table and a book are both just 'it'), so this is a genuinely new habit to build, not a mapping from anything English already does.

Lesson 4.01A1

Demonstrative Adjectives: ce, cet, cette, ces

French 'this/that' as an adjective changes form to match the noun's gender and number — a fourth wrinkle French adds on top of le/la/les that English's invariable 'this/that/these/those' doesn't need.

Lesson 5A1

Plural Nouns

English plural -s is usually pronounced clearly (book → books, with an audible 's' or 'z' sound). French plurals are mostly written but silent — you often can't hear the difference between singular and plural at all, and have to listen to the article instead.

Lesson 6A1

Numbers 1–10

English numbers become transparent compounds from thirteen onward (thir-TEEN is clearly three + ten), with only eleven and twelve as odd ones out. French breaks that transparency earlier and for longer, so it's worth flagging now before you meet 11–16.

Lesson 7A1

Numbers 11–100

French numbers stay well-behaved from 17 to 69 — and then 70, 80, and 90 do something genuinely strange that catches almost every learner off guard, English background or not.

Lesson 8A1

Family

French nouns carry grammatical gender in a way English no longer does — but for family words, gender simply tracks the person's sex, so it lines up naturally with English he/she and matches your instincts closely.

Lesson 9A1

Partitive Articles: du, de la, des

This is a genuinely new category for English speakers — English has no dedicated grammatical article for 'some amount of' something (it just uses 'some', or nothing at all). French does, and it shows up constantly around food and everyday needs.

Lesson 10A1

Question Words

French question words sit at the front of the sentence, the same slot English question words occupy — the real trick in French is picking the right word for 'what', since que and quoi split along a line English's single word 'what' doesn't draw.

Lesson 10.01A1

Three Ways to Ask Questions: Intonation, Est-ce que, Inversion

French gives you three different tools for turning a statement into a question, and which one you pick signals how formal you're being — English speakers already know the intonation trick and the inversion trick separately, but French formalizes all three into one clear system.

Lesson 11A1

Modal Verbs: vouloir, pouvoir, devoir

These three verbs — want, can, must — carry enormous everyday weight in French, and all three are irregular. English 'want/can/must' are already ordinary subject-verb pairings too, so the structure feels familiar, but French's modals are full verbs that conjugate for every person, unlike English's frozen modals 'can' and 'must'.

Lesson 12A1

-ER, -IR, -RE Verbs & Daily Routine

Almost every French verb belongs to one of three predictable families, named after their infinitive ending. English verbs barely conjugate at all (I speak, you speak, he speaks — only one form changes), so French asking you to actively produce six different endings per verb is new work, but learn the pattern once per family and you can conjugate hundreds of verbs at a stroke.

Lesson 13A1

Food & Ordering

French café and restaurant culture runs on a handful of fixed polite phrases — learn these and you can order confidently anywhere from a Paris café to a village boulangerie.

Lesson 14A1

Sentence Structure

French word order is one of the more comfortable matches for English speakers — both languages build sentences subject-verb-object, in that fixed order, almost all the time. The differences worth flagging early are negation, which wraps around the verb instead of using a single word, and adjective position, which often flips to after the noun.

Lesson 14.01A1

Negation: ne...pas and Beyond

sentence-structure.json already introduced ne...pas as French's signature two-part negation. Here's the fuller family of negative expressions built on the same wrap-around pattern, plus a very common spoken-French shortcut.

Lesson 14.02A1

Aller, Faire & the Near Future (futur proche)

aller ('to go') and faire ('to do/make') are two of the most-used verbs in French, and together they unlock a simple, extremely common way to talk about the near future — one that will feel remarkably familiar, since English builds its own 'going to' future the exact same way.

Lesson 14.03A1

Telling Time

French tells time with a feminine 'heure(s)' that quietly agrees in number just like any other noun — small detail, but it trips learners who expect a fixed, invariable time-word the way English's 'o'clock' never changes.

Lesson 14.04A1

Weather & Seasons

French describes weather with a dummy subject il, similar to English's dummy 'it' in 'it's raining' — the constructions differ underneath, but the basic idea of a meaningless placeholder subject should already feel familiar.

Lesson 14.05A1

Shopping & Money

France uses the euro, and shopping conversations lean on a small set of fixed questions and phrases you'll reuse constantly — from a bakery counter to a clothing shop.

Lesson 14.06A1

Introducing Yourself

Introducing yourself in French leans heavily on one reflexive verb, s'appeler ('to call oneself'), used before you've learned reflexive verbs properly — worth memorizing as a fixed phrase for now. It also uses avoir ('to have'), not être ('to be'), for age, which trips up English speakers every time.

Lesson 14.07A1

Countries, Nationalities & Languages

Country names in French carry gender just like any other noun, which decides which preposition you use for 'in/to' that country — a preview of a fuller lesson to come. Nationality words also behave quite differently from their English counterparts.

Lesson 14.08A1

Dates & Calendar

French dates use plain counting numbers, not ordinal numbers like English's 'the third' — with a single, memorable exception for the first of the month.

Lesson 14.09A1

Directions & Getting Around

Asking for and giving directions is a natural place to meet the imperative mood for the first time — commands like 'turn' and 'continue' — before its full grammar is covered later.

Lesson 14.1A1

Clothing & Colors

Color words in French are adjectives, so they change form to agree with the noun they describe — a shirt can be bleu or bleue depending purely on the noun's gender, something English colour words never do.

Lesson 14.11A1

Basic Jobs & Occupations

French job nouns usually come in matching masculine/feminine pairs, like French nouns generally — and there's a neat grammar shortcut for stating your job that drops the article English always requires.

Lesson 14.12A1

Making Requests & Invitations

Casual French invitations use ça te dit de..., an idiom that doesn't translate word-for-word into English — but politer requests lean on the same conditionnel softening you first saw in je voudrais, which maps neatly onto English's own 'could you' politeness instinct.

Lesson 14.13A1

Exam Writing: Filling Out a Form

A1 exams often include a simple form-filling task — knowing the standard French form vocabulary in advance turns a potentially confusing task into a quick, mechanical one.

Lesson 14.14A1

Exam Writing: An Informal Letter

Informal French letters and messages follow a loose but recognizable shape — a warm opening, casual closing formulas — that's worth having ready-made for A1 writing tasks. Formal correspondence, with its much stricter formulas, comes later.

Elementary

· 29 lessons

Lesson 15A2

The Past Tense: Passé Composé

French's everyday past tense is built from two words — a helper verb (avoir or être) plus a past participle — much like English's present perfect ('I have eaten'), except French uses this compound form for simple narration too, not just for actions with present relevance.

Lesson 15.01A2

The Imparfait: Formation & Basic Uses

Where the passé composé marks a completed event, the imparfait paints the background — ongoing action, habits, description. English handles this with 'was doing' and 'used to' rather than a dedicated verb tense, so French marking it with its own conjugation is a genuinely new grammatical habit to build.

Lesson 16A2

Object Pronouns: Direct & Indirect

French object pronouns jump to a position right before the verb — unlike English, where object pronouns simply stay put after the verb ('I see him', not 'I him see').

Lesson 16.01A2

Indefinite Pronouns: on, quelqu'un, personne, quelque chose, rien

These small words cover 'someone/no one' and 'something/nothing' — and one of them, on, is so common in everyday spoken French that it quietly replaces nous in casual conversation, a bit like how English 'you' can informally mean 'people in general' ('you never know').

Lesson 17A2

Y and EN: Pronominal Adverbs

y and en are two tiny words that stand in for entire prepositional phrases — a mechanism with no real equivalent in English. Treat this lesson as learning a genuinely new category, not mapping an existing habit onto French.

Lesson 18A2

Prepositions of Place & Time

French locates things with prepositions placed before the noun, the same direction English works in — so the basic word order here should feel familiar, even where the exact words and their coverage differ.

Lesson 19A2

Prepositions with Countries & Cities

Saying 'in' or 'to' a country in French depends entirely on that country's grammatical gender — a classic tricky point with no English parallel, since English 'in France' / 'in Japan' / 'in the United States' uses the same word 'in' regardless of the country.

Lesson 20A2

Reflexive (Pronominal) Verbs

French routes most daily-routine actions — waking, washing, getting dressed — through a reflexive pronoun that mirrors the subject. English only does this for emphasis ('I hurt myself') and treats routines as plain verbs ('I wake up', 'I get dressed'), so the constant extra pronoun in French is a new layer to track.

Lesson 20.01A2

Pronominal Verbs: Reflexive, Reciprocal & Idiomatic

Not every verb with se in front of it is truly 'reflexive' in meaning — French reuses the same se pattern for three genuinely different jobs, and telling them apart matters for understanding, even though the grammar looks identical.

Lesson 21A2

Possessive Adjectives

French possessives (mon, ton, son...) agree with the noun being possessed, not with the owner — the opposite logic from what English speakers instinctively expect from 'his' and 'her'.

Lesson 22A2

Subordinate Clauses: parce que, que, quand

French links clauses together with connector words placed at the seam, while word order inside each clause stays fixed SVO — the same subject-verb-object order English uses, so nothing has to be reordered when you add a subordinate clause.

Lesson 23A2

Modal Verbs in the Past

vouloir, pouvoir, and devoir change their flavor of meaning depending on which past tense you put them in — the imparfait describes an ongoing state, while the passé composé often marks a single decisive moment, sometimes with a surprisingly different English translation.

Lesson 24A2

Comparatives & Superlatives

French builds comparisons by wrapping the adjective in plus/moins/aussi...que, rather than changing the adjective's ending the way English '-er/-est' does for short adjectives.

Lesson 24.01A2

Comparing Nouns vs. Adjectives: plus de vs. plus

Two structures look almost identical but do different jobs — plus de counts a noun, while plus alone intensifies an adjective or adverb. Mixing them up is one of the most common A2 slip-ups, especially since English 'more' covers both cases with a single word.

Lesson 24.02A2

Irregular Comparatives: bon → meilleur, bien → mieux

A small handful of very common words refuse to take plus at all — the same irregular pattern English shows with good/better and well/better, and worth learning as fixed exceptions rather than derived forms.

Lesson 25A2

Imperative (Commands)

French drops the subject pronoun for commands, just like English commands do ('Eat!' not 'You eat!') — but French also quietly drops a letter from -er verbs, a small spelling quirk worth knowing upfront.

Lesson 26A2

Adjective Agreement & Position

French adjectives change their spelling to match the noun's gender and number — a genuinely new skill for English speakers, since English adjectives like 'good' never change no matter what they describe.

Lesson 26.01A2

Health & Body

Talking about pain and body parts in French leans heavily on avoir mal à — a fixed construction worth learning as a whole phrase rather than building word by word.

Lesson 26.02A2

Hobbies & Free Time

French hobby verbs often pair with jouer à (for games/sports) or jouer de (for instruments) — a fixed distinction worth locking in early, since English uses the single verb 'play' for both.

Lesson 26.03A2

Travel & Transportation

Getting around by different modes of transport uses en for most vehicles but à pied and à vélo for the ones you straddle or walk — a small preposition pattern worth memorizing as pairs, since English 'by' covers all of them uniformly.

Lesson 26.04A2

House & Home

Rooms and furniture vocabulary, plus the everyday verb habiter (to live/reside), which is slightly more flexible than English 'live' about the preposition before a city.

Lesson 26.05A2

Describing People

Describing appearance and personality puts the adjective-agreement rules from the last lesson to real use — watch each adjective's ending track the gender of the person being described, something English adjectives never do.

Lesson 26.06A2

Making Plans Together

Phrases for proposing, accepting, and adjusting plans — a natural payoff for the futur proche (aller + infinitif) you learned back at A1.

Lesson 26.07A2

Describing a Picture

A common A2 exam task: describe a photo aloud. These are the fixed openers and spatial phrases examiners expect to hear.

Lesson 26.08A2

Narrating Past Experiences

This lesson is about putting the passé composé and imparfait to work telling a simple personal story — sequencing words matter as much as the tenses themselves. The deeper theory of when to choose which tense comes later at B1.

Lesson 26.09A2

Celebrations & Holidays

Vocabulary for French holidays and celebration customs — some, like Noël and le 14 juillet, are distinctly French/national occasions rather than direct equivalents of the ones an English speaker already knows.

Lesson 26.1A2

Technology & Communication

Everyday vocabulary for phones, messaging, and the internet — note that French has an official replacement for the English loanword 'email' (courriel, especially in formal or Québécois usage), though 'mail'/'email' remain common in everyday France.

Lesson 26.11A2

Making an Appointment

Fixed phone and in-person phrases for booking, confirming, and rescheduling an appointment — the kind of transactional French that comes up constantly in daily life.

Lesson 26.12A2

Exam Writing: Responding to a Message

A standard A2 writing task: reply to a short informal message from a friend. These openers and closers are the reusable scaffolding examiners look for.

Intermediate

· 27 lessons

Lesson 26.13B1

Passé Composé vs. Imparfait in Narration

English tells a whole story with one simple past form ('I walked, I saw, I spoke') and reaches for 'was/were doing' only when it wants to stress that something was in progress. French makes a much sharper, grammatically obligatory choice for every single past verb: passé composé for what happened, imparfait for what was going on or was simply true at the time. Getting this right is one of the biggest jumps from A2 to fluent-sounding B1 French.

Lesson 27B1

Demonstrative Pronouns: celui, celle, ceux, celles

English has one all-purpose placeholder word for 'this/that as a standalone thing' — 'one' — used the same way no matter what it stands in for ('this one', 'that one', 'the ones'). French demonstrative pronouns instead come in four different shapes that must agree in gender and number with the noun they replace, and unlike English 'one', they can never stand completely alone — they always need a suffix (-ci/-là) or a following de/qui/que to complete them.

Lesson 27.01B1

Possessive Pronouns: le mien, le tien, le sien...

English has one dedicated, article-free word for each possessive pronoun — mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs — that never changes shape no matter what's being possessed. French possessive pronouns instead keep an article (le/la/les) and change their ending to agree with the gender and number of the THING possessed, on top of already varying by person — a much bigger paradigm than English's single set of six words.

Lesson 28B1

Relative Pronouns: qui, que, où, dont

English relative pronouns split mainly by whether the antecedent is a person ('who/whom') or a thing ('which'), with 'that' usable for either and often droppable altogether. French relative pronouns ignore that person/thing distinction completely and instead choose the pronoun by grammatical role inside the clause — subject, object, or object-of-de — which means a single French pronoun like qui covers both 'the man who...' and 'the train that...' with no separate word needed for people versus things.

Lesson 29B1

Passive Voice

English forms the passive the same basic way French does — a form of 'be' plus a past participle — so the construction itself should feel immediately recognizable. The one real difference: French requires that past participle to agree in gender and number with the subject, exactly like an adjective, something English past participles never do.

Lesson 29.01B1

Passive Agent Marking: par vs. de

English marks the passive agent with a single all-purpose word, 'by', no matter what kind of verb is involved. French splits this job between two prepositions — par for concrete, active, one-time actions, and de for states, emotions, or habitual/permanent conditions — a distinction English simply doesn't make, so it can't be predicted from the English sentence at all.

Lesson 30B1

Future Tense: Futur Simple

English builds its future with a helper word ('will' or 'going to') sitting in front of an unchanging verb. French futur simple instead changes the verb itself into a single new word, with endings that happen to be identical to the present tense of avoir — a genuinely different mechanism from anything in English, where the main verb never changes shape to mark future time.

Lesson 30.01B1

Plus-que-parfait: The Past-Before-the-Past

English has an exact structural twin for this tense — the past perfect, 'I had eaten' — so plus-que-parfait should feel like one of the most intuitive tenses so far: same logic, same 'further-back past' job, just built from avoir/être's imparfait instead of 'had'.

Lesson 31B1

Conditionnel Présent: Hypotheticals & Polite Requests

English 'would' does double duty for hypotheticals and, less often, politeness ('would you...?'). French conditionnel présent is a fully conjugated verb form (not a helper word) built on the same irregular stems as futur simple, and it's the everyday way to soften a request — je voudrais rather than the blunter je veux, much like English 'I would like' already sounds politer than 'I want'.

Lesson 32B1

Infinitive Clauses: pour, sans, au lieu de + infinitif

English typically reaches for a gerund ('-ing') after prepositions like 'without' and 'instead of' — 'without seeing', 'instead of going'. French uses the plain infinitive after these prepositions instead, never a form resembling '-ing', which makes this a systematic trap: the natural English translation pattern actively points you toward the wrong French form.

Lesson 33B1

Si Clauses: Type 1 & Type 2 Conditionals

English if-clauses already distinguish real conditions from hypothetical ones in a similar way to French ('If you study, you will succeed' vs. 'If I had more time, I would travel more') — so the underlying logic of Type 1 vs. Type 2 should feel familiar. The main task here is matching the exact French tense pairing, not learning the concept of conditionals from scratch.

Lesson 34B1

Double Conjunctions: soit...soit, ni...ni

English pairs 'either...or' and 'neither...nor' in much the same structural way French pairs soit...soit and ni...ni — a close match overall. The one real trap: French ni...ni still requires the separate negation particle ne before the verb, whereas English 'neither...nor' already carries its own negation and needs no extra negative word at all.

Lesson 35B1

Past Participle Agreement: avoir vs. être, and the Preceding Direct Object Rule

English past participles never change shape no matter what they're agreeing with — 'written' stays 'written' whether you say 'the letter I have written' or 'the letters I have written'. French past participles, by contrast, can behave like adjectives and change their ending for gender and number — but only under specific, learnable conditions. This is one of the genuinely hard corners of French grammar, and it rewards careful, deliberate attention rather than a quick skim, because English gives you no instinct to fall back on here at all.

Lesson 36B1

Prepositional Verbs: penser à, avoir besoin de, s'intéresser à

English verb-preposition pairings are already often arbitrary and don't translate word-for-word into French — 'think about' uses 'about', but French uses à; 'need' takes no preposition at all in English, while French avoir besoin requires de. These pairings have to be memorized as fixed units rather than assembled logically by translating the English preposition.

Lesson 37B1

Time Expressions: depuis, il y a, pendant, dans

English 'for' and 'since' both describe ongoing duration, and English pairs them with a present-perfect verb ('I have lived here for five years'). French depuis instead pairs with a PRESENT-tense verb for exactly the same meaning — one of the most consistently surprising tense mismatches for English speakers at this level.

Lesson 38B1

Reported Speech: Le Discours Indirect

English backshifts tenses when reporting speech in the past too — 'I am tired' becomes 'She said she was tired' — so the underlying logic of reported speech will feel familiar. French applies a similarly systematic set of tense shifts, just using its own tense inventory (imparfait, plus-que-parfait, conditionnel) to stand in for French's présent/passé composé/futur simple.

Lesson 38.01B1

Work & Career

B1 workplace French moves past simply naming a job (covered back at A1) into talking about the job itself — applying, interviewing, describing responsibilities, and discussing career changes.

Lesson 38.02B1

Environment & Sustainability

B1 environmental French moves beyond basic weather/nature words into the vocabulary needed to discuss climate, pollution, and sustainable habits — a common topic in exam writing and speaking tasks.

Lesson 38.03B1

Media & News

Exams often ask B1 candidates to summarize or react to news content, so this vocabulary set focuses on talking about what's in the news and how you found out about it.

Lesson 38.04B1

Opinions: Agreeing & Disagreeing

Expressing and reacting to opinions is a core conversational and exam skill at B1 — moving beyond a simple 'je pense que' into a fuller toolkit for agreeing, disagreeing, and nuancing a position.

Lesson 38.05B1

Formal Letters & Emails

French formal correspondence follows very fixed opening and closing formulas, far more rigid than typical English business-letter conventions — learning the set phrases matters more here than generating original sentences.

Lesson 38.06B1

Giving a Structured Presentation

A structured French oral presentation (exposé) leans on a specific set of signpost phrases to organize ideas — useful both for oral exams and for real-world presentations.

Lesson 38.07B1

Advantages & Disadvantages

Weighing pros and cons is a recurring writing and speaking task at B1 — this lesson gives the standard vocabulary for structuring that kind of balanced discussion.

Lesson 38.08B1

Complaints & Problems

Making a polite-but-firm complaint — about a product, service, or situation — is both a real-world skill and a classic writing prompt (the 'problem email' format practiced in the next lesson).

Lesson 38.09B1

Life Plans & Wishes

Talking about future goals and wishes draws together several tenses already learned — futur simple for plans, conditionnel for wishes — giving this lesson a natural role as a B1 review-and-apply topic.

Lesson 38.1B1

Reacting & Giving Feedback

Beyond simple agreement/disagreement (covered earlier in this level), this lesson gives phrases for reacting with surprise, enthusiasm, or constructive criticism — useful for everyday conversation and for peer-feedback exam tasks.

Lesson 38.11B1

Exam Writing: A Problem Email

This is a signature B1 written-production exam task: write a semi-formal email explaining a problem and requesting a solution. This lesson gives the fixed structural phrases examiners expect to see, building on the complaints vocabulary from the previous lesson.

Upper Intermediate

· 23 lessons

Lesson 39B2

Passive with Modal-like Verbs: devoir être fait

Combine the passive voice from B1 with devoir or pouvoir, and French stacks three pieces at once — the modal-like verb conjugated, être left in the infinitive, and a past participle that still has to agree with the subject.

Lesson 40B2

Subjonctif Présent: Formation & Basic Triggers

Everything up to now has used the indicatif, the mood for stating facts. B2 opens up the subjonctif — a whole second verb mood, triggered by certain expressions, that marks a clause as a wish, doubt, necessity, or emotion rather than a settled fact. It is the single most important grammar topic at this level, precisely because English speakers have almost no living instinct for it.

Lesson 41B2

Participe Présent & Gérondif

French builds one -ant form per verb, then uses it two ways: bare, as a formal adjective or reduced relative clause, or with en in front to describe two things happening at once — a single verb form doing work that English spreads across several different -ing constructions.

Lesson 42B2

Nominalization: Turning Verbs & Adjectives into Nouns

Formal and written French prefers compressing a clause into a noun phrase (la décision du gouvernement de...) rather than stringing full clauses together — a habit English academic and journalistic writing shares, and one where cognate suffixes give English speakers a genuine head start.

Lesson 42.01B2

Word Formation: Prefixes ré-, dé-, in-/im-, mal-

A handful of prefixes systematically reshape a French verb or adjective's meaning — several are close or exact English cognates, which turns an intimidating unfamiliar word into a familiar root plus a predictable twist.

Lesson 43B2

plus...plus / moins...moins (The More..., the More...)

French pairs plus or moins twice, once per clause, to build 'the more..., the more...' — structurally it lines up neatly with English's own version of the pattern, with one small trap around the missing article.

Lesson 44B2

Concessive Clauses: bien que, quoique, malgré

French marks 'although' with a subjonctif-triggering conjunction, and 'despite' with a plain preposition — the same clause-vs-noun split English makes with 'although' and 'despite', but with an extra mood-shift English doesn't require.

Lesson 45B2

Result Clauses: si...que, tellement...que, si bien que

French wraps 'so...that' around a single adjective, or links two whole events with 'so that' — both stay safely in the indicatif, unlike most of the subjonctif triggers around them, and both map onto English almost word for word.

Lesson 46B2

Purpose Clauses: pour que vs. pour + infinitif

Purpose clauses split by the same same-subject test you met with vouloir in the subjonctif lesson: one person's purpose uses a plain infinitive, two different people's purposes force a full subjonctif clause — a stricter rule than English's own, more flexible 'so that'.

Lesson 47B2

Indirect Questions: si and Interrogative Words

Embedding a question inside a statement — 'I don't know whether...', 'I wonder where...' — needs its own connecting word in French, chosen based on whether the original question had a question word at all, much as English does.

Lesson 48B2

Passive Alternatives: on, se faire + infinitif

Beyond être + past participle, spoken French leans on two shorter, more natural alternatives — the impersonal on, and se faire + infinitif for something happening TO the subject, both of which have close functional cousins in English.

Lesson 49B2

Two-Part Connectors: d'une part...d'autre part

French formally weighs two sides of an argument with paired connectors — one set for balancing a contrast, another for stacking two points in the same direction — and both sets match their English equivalents almost word for word.

Lesson 50B2

Prepositions of Concession, Cause & Duration: malgré, à cause de, pendant

Rounding out the connector set from this level, these prepositions all take a plain noun rather than a full clause — no subjonctif question ever arises with them, unlike their clause-based cousins bien que and pour que.

Lesson 50.01B2

Politics & Society

Political and social vocabulary leans on the impersonal on and passive constructions from this course — French news prefers to foreground the policy itself, not who enacted it, a habit English-language journalism shares closely.

Lesson 50.02B2

Economy & Business

Economic reporting favors nominalized phrasing — a natural place to apply the -tion/-ment/-ance patterns from earlier in this level, and one where English cognates make several new words easy to recognize.

Lesson 50.03B2

Science & Technology

Science writing chains together nominalized verbs with de — good practice for parsing dense French science journalism, and a topic area where English cognates are especially generous.

Lesson 50.04B2

Discussion & Debate Phrases

B2 debate fluency is less about new grammar and more about a toolkit of ready-made framing phrases that let you agree, disagree, and hand off the floor smoothly — English has its own version of the same toolkit.

Lesson 50.05B2

Culture & the Arts

Talking about creative work is one of the most natural places to reach for the true French passive with par — unlike political register, art criticism regularly names the creator explicitly, just as English art writing does with 'by'.

Lesson 50.06B2

Describing a Graph or Chart

Narrating a trend line in words leans on a small, fixed set of directional verbs and comparison prepositions — worth memorizing as a unit, since B2 exam tasks specifically test this skill.

Lesson 50.07B2

Structuring a Formal Essay (Dissertation)

French formal essay writing follows a distinctive three-part mold rarely taught explicitly in English composition — knowing its name and shape is half the battle at exam time.

Lesson 50.08B2

Formal Agreement & Disagreement

Formal disagreement in French almost never opens with a flat non — it concedes the other side's point first, then pivots, softening the disagreement before delivering it, the same rhetorical move formal English writing makes.

Lesson 50.09B2

Trends & Statistics Vocabulary

Statistical French reaches for rounded fraction words as often as exact percentages — recognizing these words fluently matters more at B2 than memorizing precise numbers.

Lesson 50.1B2

Expressing Speculation & Probability

Speculating about something you're not certain of — a common B2 discussion skill — spreads across three different grammatical tools in French, each signaling a different level of confidence, much as English grades certainty across its own set of modal verbs.

Advanced

· 21 lessons

Lesson 51C1

Discourse Particles & Fillers: quand même, en fait, du coup, justement

French never grammaticalized a closed particle class — English hasn't either, but everyday English fillers like actually, so, still, and you know do overlapping conversational work, so the underlying instinct will feel familiar even though the individual French words don't map onto their nearest English gloss word-for-word.

Lesson 52C1

Conditionnel Passé: Past Hypotheticals

The conditionnel passé is French's version of the English third conditional you already know — 'if I had known, I would have called' — so the underlying logic transfers directly; what needs care is the machinery underneath, since French builds it from avoir/être + past participle exactly like passé composé, with the same auxiliary-choice and agreement rules layered on top.

Lesson 53C1

Style Nominal vs. Style Verbal

Formal written English already leans on nominalization too — 'the implementation of the decision' instead of 'we implemented the decision' — but French pushes this habit much further, making the nominal style the unmarked default in journalism, official reports, and academic prose, rather than just one option among several registers.

Lesson 54C1

Double Object Pronouns & Their Order

English also juggles two object pronouns in one sentence ('he gave it to me'), but English pronouns simply stay in ordinary post-verb word order — French instead locks both pronouns into a strict pre-verb, five-column sequence that has to be learned as a table, since English gives you no built-in instinct for it.

Lesson 55C1

Function Verb Constructions: faire/prendre/avoir + Noun

Formal French often prefers a 'light verb' plus a noun over a single simple verb — faire une promesse instead of promettre — and English does exactly the same thing (make a promise, take a decision, have a look, pay attention), so the underlying pattern will already feel familiar, even though the specific verb-noun pairings never translate word for word.

Lesson 56C1

Advanced Discourse Connectors

Formal English essays and reports lean on the same kind of small connector set — however, nevertheless, consequently, furthermore — so the register instinct transfers directly; what needs care is that a few French connectors are false friends or split hairs that English collapses into a single word.

Lesson 57C1

Passé Simple: The Literary Past Tense

Passé simple is a tense with no equivalent in English at all — English marks a single completed past action with the simple past regardless of register ('he was born' works identically in a novel and in casual conversation), while French splits that same job between two entirely different tenses depending on formality: passé composé for speech and everyday writing, passé simple reserved for literary narration and never spoken aloud.

Lesson 58C1

Attitude & Nuance Markers: au fait, franchement, tout de même, décidément

These four adverbs each color a French sentence with a specific unspoken attitude — a casual afterthought, blunt honesty, mild indignation, or a dawning realization — jobs English fillers like 'by the way,' 'frankly,' 'still,' and 'honestly' already do, so the concepts are familiar even where the exact boundaries between the French words don't line up neatly with their nearest English gloss.

Lesson 59C1

Subjonctif Passé & Advanced Subjunctive Triggers

English marks almost none of this with verb mood at all — 'I'm glad you succeeded' uses the ordinary past tense whether the fact is objective or subjective — so subjonctif passé, and the widened set of subjunctive triggers here, are genuinely new territory rather than an extension of anything English grammar already flags.

Lesson 60C1

Fine-Grained Conditionals: dès que, pourvu que, à condition que, au cas où

Four conjunctions look similar to their nearest English glosses — 'as soon as,' 'provided that,' 'on condition that,' 'in case' — but each locks French into a different mood and tense pattern that English doesn't require, so surface similarity can mislead you into using the wrong construction.

Lesson 61C1

Idioms & Figurative Language

Idioms resist word-for-word translation everywhere — French is no exception, and puzzling out avoir le cafard or poser un lapin from their literal words alone will lead you astray, so treat each one as a fixed image to learn whole, the same way you already do with English idioms like 'spill the beans' or 'once in a blue moon.'

Lesson 62C1

Register Switching: Formal vs. Colloquial French

The final C1 skill isn't a new grammar rule — it's knowing when to deploy everything you've learned. Spoken French drops sounds, contracts pronouns, and reaches for entirely different vocabulary compared to the more formal French this course has mostly taught, roughly the same gap English speakers already navigate between 'I am not going to' and 'I'm not gonna,' or between 'Have you seen him?' and 'You seen him?'

Lesson 62.01C1

Academic & Scientific Register

Academic French has its own toolkit of hedges, connectors, and fixed openings for reading a research paper or writing a dissertation — distinct from both the formal-conversation register and the bureaucratic register covered elsewhere in this level, and notably more allergic to the first-person 'I' than academic English typically is.

Lesson 62.02C1

Legal & Bureaucratic Vocabulary

French officialese has a vocabulary all its own — government forms, contracts, legal documents — thick with fixed formulas, in much the same way English legal writing preserves its own fossilized Latinisms and archaic terms (heretofore, aforementioned, notwithstanding) that never surface in ordinary conversation.

Lesson 62.03C1

Professional Meetings & Presentations

Running or contributing to a French-language meeting calls for its own set of fixed phrases — for setting the agenda, taking the floor, and steering discussion back on track — many of which soften statements with the conditionnel exactly the way professional English softens with 'would' and 'could.'

Lesson 62.04C1

Literary & Journalistic Style

Reading a French newspaper editorial or a novel calls on a distinct vocabulary of craft and technique — words for describing how a piece is written, not just what it says — and French headline conventions turn out to closely match a trick English headlines already use.

Lesson 62.05C1

Humor, Irony & Cultural Nuance

Getting a joke in another language is often the last skill to arrive — French humor leans on wordplay, deadpan understatement, and irony markers that need explicit vocabulary to even name, let alone catch in the moment, and French irony tends to rely on cultural context and delivery even more than English sarcasm does.

Lesson 62.06C1

Summarizing a Text (Résumé)

The résumé is a fixed exam and academic genre in French — condensing a text to a fraction of its length while preserving its argument — a skill that maps closely onto the English 'summary' exercise but comes with its own toolkit of French framing phrases.

Lesson 62.07C1

Nuanced Counter-Argumentation

Arguing a point in formal French rarely means flatly asserting 'you're wrong' — the language has a whole register of concede-then-pivot phrases for granting part of an opponent's point before turning the argument around, the same rhetorical move English essays make with 'admittedly... but' or 'granted... however.'

Lesson 62.08C1

Professional Correspondence: Memos & Formal Emails

A French memo or formal email follows a fixed skeleton of openings, framing phrases, and closings — deviate from the formula and even a well-argued message can read as oddly casual, much as skipping 'Dear Sir/Madam' and 'Yours sincerely' in a formal English letter would.

Lesson 62.09C1

Structuring an Abstract Presentation

Presenting an abstract argument in French — a thesis defense, a conference talk, a formal debate — follows a recognizable skeleton: frame the issue, lay out a plan, and signal each transition explicitly, more rigidly and more overtly than the looser structure English presentations often get away with.