u/Bonjour-Set-4490

tried to memorise these as a list for weeks, y for there en for some, and id still freeze in a real sentence and grab whichever sounded ok.

what helped was forgetting the pronouns and just looking at what the verb takes. penser à quelque chose kept getting me but once i clocked the à i knew it was y. works the other way too, the de verbs like parler de come out en.

still doesnt fix everything, i drop the y completely when im talking fast. said on va instead of on y va yesterday lol. and idk if this even holds once you get past the basic stuff.

is this actually right or am i gonna get wrecked by exceptions later

recorded a few sentences yesterday, scored word by word. one i knew cold came back 91. the next, 25. same mouth, two minutes apart. the 25 wasnt my accent, it was one word, blanked on de l'eau for half a second and the whole sentence fell apart while i scrambled for it. so what kills me mid sentence is retrieval, not accent. trying to drill the common words to be automatic now, no idea if its helping yet tbh. whats the word that always vanishes right when you need it?

been practising my speaking with one of those things that scores your pronunciation, gives you a number out of 100 each go. and i keep wondering what the number is actually for.

ive nudged it up on a few sentences but i have no clue if a real french person would get me any better. it passed me on one yesterday where i definitely mumbled half the word. so what is it even clocking, idk.

anyone who's actually used these, did the number ever line up with real people understanding you? or is it just measuring how clearly you can shout into a mic. i cant tell anymore.

my tutor told me this week id basically finished A2. instead of being happy i just said no, lets keep drilling it a bit longer.

its cause i keep doing this thing where i get a rule right 3 times in a row, feel great, then completely blank on it 20 min later. like which verbs take être vs avoir in the passé composé. i swear ive "got it" about five separate times now and it still falls out of my head.

part of me wants the next level but it feels dumb to tick A2 off when stuff im supposedly done with keeps disappearing on me.

idk. anyone else just not believe it when youre told youre ready to move up?

biggest problem for me at a2 was that i could practice talking all day but had no idea if any of it was actually right. no tutor, no french person in the room at 11pm.

this is just what i do now. takes about 10 min and theres nothing to sign up for.

1. write 3 or 4 sentences about your actual day, stuff youd really say out loud.

2. paste them into google translate and hit the little speaker icon. thats your reference audio. its a bit robotic but the sounds are right.

3. record yourself saying the same sentences in your phones voice memo app.

4. play one google sentence, then your version right after it. go sentence by sentence. the gaps are really obvious when theyre back to back. for me its always the nasals and skipping the liaison.

5. re-record till theyre close, then move on.

one honest caveat. this only checks how you SOUND, not your grammar. translate will happily read a wrong sentence back to you in a lovely accent. for the grammar half i just dump my sentences in r/WriteStreakFR and people fix them for free.

not selling anything, all of it is free. still very much a beginner so if theres a better free way to self-check im all ears.

a2 here. been saying stuff like je visite mon ami and getting corrected every single time, apparently its rendre visite à or aller voir for a person. so visiter is fine for a museum or a city but the second its an actual human you need a whole different verb. in english visit just does both and my brain wont let go of that. anyone know if theres an actual reason a person gets its own verb? feels kinda random but french usually has some logic im missing

so im a2 and married into a french family, and sunday lunch is still mostly me nodding along while everyone talks over each other. i keep picking up little things at that table that never show up in any course, heres one. her dad (and basically everyone) opens half his sentences with bah. ask if he wants more wine, bah oui. ask if the drive was bad, bah non. someone says something obvious and he just goes bah on its own with a little shrug. assimil never once taught me it but its everywhere once you start listening, feels like a verbal shrug more than an actual word. is there a rule for when it comes out or is it just vibes

about a month into french and some corrections are sticking way faster than others, which i wasnt really expecting.

some just fix themselves. i had this habit of putting the pronoun in the wrong spot (english brain, wanting it after the verb), and once someone pointed out it actually goes before the verb it was gone by the next day.

prendre is the opposite. ive drilled it more than anything else this week and it still comes out wrong most times. still cant work out why that one wont go when other stuff locks in a day or two.

is it this lopsided for everyone? and if you had a verb or rule like that and eventually beat it, what actually did it for you?

my wifes french so im learning it properly, gave myself till end of year to get to b2, and the oral is the part that scares me. so i worked out how to prep it without paying for a course. sharing my notes in case it helps. this isn't an ad and everything below is free.

quick honesty: im about a month in and nowhere near b2 yet, so this is the map i pieced together from the official format + people who've actually passed, not me posing as an expert. corrections welcome.

what the oral actually is: you draw two short docs, pick one, get ~30 min to prep, then argue a position on it and defend it against the examiner. it's not a summary. the skill being tested is holding an opinion in french, not reciting vocab. that reframe changed how i prep more than anything.

the scoring trap people miss: four sections out of 25, you need 50/100 overall, but under 5/25 in any single section fails the whole exam no matter your total. and there's no modular retake, you redo the lot. speaking is the section that quietly drifts toward that floor because it's slowest to build, so protect it first.

what's actually helped, all free:

- daily out-loud reps. pick a prompt, timer, talk 60 seconds without stopping. feels awful at first. the freeze on the day is usually the format catching you off guard, not a vocab gap.

- rehearse the structure, not the words. intro stating your position, two points, a conclusion, connecteurs (d'une part, en revanche, par conséquent). drill forcing any random opinion into that shape.

- record-and-compare for pronunciation. RFI's Journal en français facile (slow, daily, full transcript) is perfect. record yourself, play both back, fix the one worst sound that day.

- free input + real tasks: InnerFrench (slow podcast), TV5Monde's Apprendre le français, and free DELF blancs from France Education International so you practise the actual tasks under time.

- rehearse the débat: get someone (or even ChatGPT) to push back so you practise defending, not just presenting.

if you can spend a little near the exam, save it for a few italki or Alliance Française sessions, a real ear catches what you can't hear in yourself.

if you've already sat the b2 oral, what actually moved your speaking and what felt productive but didn't really do much? happy to answer anything in the comments.

For weeks of B2 prep almost everything I wrote went into the passé composé. English gives us one simple past, so reaching for one past tense felt natural, and it was wrong about half the time. What helped was to stop translating and ask one thing: completed event, or background? Passé composé is a finished event (j'ai pris un café), imparfait is the background, what was going on or what used to happen (il pleuvait, je travaillais le soir). Someone here once called it photo vs film, that stuck. Drilling it that way it started landing, and it even held up when I described my day out loud with no script. If you had the same default-to-passé-composé habit, what got you off it?

Been recording myself for a few weeks and the first word or two is always mush, then my mouth catches up by the middle. je voudrais is the worst, the je vou part is gone and drais is clear as anything. Happens even on stuff I know cold. Is it just needing a second to warm up, or an English habit of hitting the front of a phrase hard? Did this sort itself out for you?

day 45 of actually doing this properly, speaking every day instead of just tapping through an app. writing it down cause its been way harder than i expected.

on paper im moving. i can drill comparatives or the y pronoun three times cold, then 20 min later in a real sentence i blank, or the words come out backwards and someone tilts their head at me. reading is miles ahead of speaking and it doesnt seem to close on its own.

worst bit was freezing at a family lunch on stuff i 100 percent know on a worksheet. that one stung.

talking out loud every day even when its bad is the only thing thats moved it, and i started way before i felt ready.

does speaking ever actually catch up to reading or is this just the deal for a while

my wifes french, her whole family is french, and after years of apps i could read it ok but completely froze any time i had to actually say something out loud. had the duolingo streak going and still couldnt hold a conversation.

so i built myself a little thing that texts me in french every day, makes me reply, and scores my pronunciation so i can see which sounds im mangling. im still very much a2 so im basically the guinea pig for my own tool.

its free and i approve people by hand, usually within a few hours. dont really care about paying users right now, i just want literally anyone besides me using it and telling me where it falls apart. its early and the voice scoring is decent, not perfect.

what im stuck on is whether voice-first is actually the move or if im just adding steps to the same old drilling. if you built this what would you track to know its working and not just busywork?

link in comments if you wanna poke at it.

a2 and comparatives keep getting me. i wrote "il est plus que moi" for "he's taller than me" a bunch of times and kept getting corrected, but apparently "je travaille plus que toi" is fine. i think the first one needs the adjective stuck in the middle somehow but i cant work out why the second one doesnt. whats the actual rule here?

so im A2, married into a french family, and sunday lunches are still mostly me nodding along and quietly panicking. last week i stopped panicking long enough to actually listen to her dad, and the man closes nearly every thought with voilà. told a whole story about his car, voilà. passed me the bread, voilà. moaned about a neighbour for a while, voilà again. i started half counting and lost track around a dozen before the cheese even came out.

assimil taught me voilà means "here it is" or "there you go". but at the table its also just a verbal full stop, the french version of "and yeah" or "so anyway". half the time it points at nothing.

is this a him thing or do french people everywhere just close sentences like this? cause now i cant unhear it.

I'm only A2, giving myself till the end of 2026 to get to B2 and I'll probably sit the DELF eventually. This is the thing that keeps nagging at me.

I can drill a grammar point until I get it right three times cold, then twenty minutes later in an actual sentence I blank. Froze up completely at a family lunch the other week on stuff I know perfectly well on a worksheet. The reading and listening climb fine, the speaking just doesn't come up with them.

The only thing that's shifted it at all is making myself talk out loud every day, badly, way before I feel ready for it.

For anyone who's actually sat the oral, did your speaking only start catching up once you drilled it on its own?

got maybe four words of real french out telling my tutor about last night, then my brain just clocked off and i wrote je prefer ce way. ce WAY. the english word, dropped right in the middle, hit send before i could stop myself.

no idea what happened. forgot how to say "this way" so hard i just handed it an english word and hoped.

My wife's French, so I'm finally learning it properly, and I've given myself till the end of the year to get to B2. The oral is miles behind my reading and writing. Those two I can just sit and grind. Speaking I keep finding reasons to skip, which I know is exactly backwards.

So for anyone who's actually sat the oral: what worked for you? I go back and forth on whether to drill the format itself (the draw-a-doc then present-and-defend bit) or just talk for hours and worry about format later. And if something ate a lot of time without really paying off, tell me that too. rather know now.

Been recording myself for a few weeks and -on, -an, -in all collapse into the same sound, even on words I know well. maison is the worst, the -on just comes out swallowed. And bon and dans sound almost identical to me, so I can't even tell if my ear is wrong. Did the nasals ever click on their own for you, or did you have to grind each one separately?

when i actually say my french out loud instead of reading it in my head, its kind of brutal how many sounds i still cant make. mine rn is the on nasal, like in maison, comes out flat and too english no matter what i try. the r next to another consonant is rough too, kind of dies in my throat lol.

whats the one that always gets you?