Learning a language also means discovering the society around it.

It starts with the things you come across every day: a shop window, an ad, a café menu, a museum or a news story. They are all ways into the French you actually hear and use in everyday life. Vocabulary and grammar are not learned in isolation, but through situations that give them meaning. So when you need French outside the lesson — to order, ask a question, talk to someone or handle an everyday situation — you are not meeting the language for the first time.

If you’re starting out, the aim is to give you French you can use quickly: understand essential exchanges, ask for what you need, answer, find your way around and build your first sentences without waiting until you “know all the grammar”.

As you progress, you work on the structures that often get in the way of spontaneous French: tenses, articles, agreement, pronouns and turns of phrase that you understand on paper but do not yet use naturally when speaking.

At an advanced level, the work becomes more nuanced: choosing more natural phrasing, adjusting your register, expressing finer distinctions and becoming more precise.

Each lesson is designed around you, using brands, situations and content carefully chosen for your level, your goals and what genuinely interests you. I then build the exercises and role-plays around them, so the French we work on is directly useful to you.

I send you a lesson recap with what we worked on, the words and expressions that came up, and the key things to remember.

I use it as a starting point for the next lesson too, so we can build on what is already in place rather than starting again each time.