u/glovelilyox

Right after I took the TCF Canada, I made this pretty exhaustive post on /r/canadaexpressentry documenting my exam experience, but it got removed, and I'm still not really sure why. Later I stumbled on this subreddit, and I figured my old post might still be helpful to people here, so here it is, copy+pasted.

I took this exam almost 4 months ago now, so heads up that some things might be a little out of date. Bon courage à tout le monde et j'espère que vous recevrez bientôt vos résidences permanentes !

Hey everyone,

I took the TCF Canada yesterday (March 14, 2026) and wanted to write up a post about it. When I was preparing, I wished there had been more posts talking about the exam itself so I would have a better idea of what to expect. I took the exam in San Francisco, this was my first attempt. I took TCF and not TEF because SF offers TCF and not TEF.

I needed a passport to be able to take this exam. I read conflicting things about if you need one or not, but my testing center at least required me to have one.

Background:

A big difference from a lot of people trying to get French for PR is that I already had a significant background in French. Starting when I was really little (~6 months), my parents put me in a daycare where I was only spoken to in French, so I picked up the sounds of French and don’t have much of a foreign accent. Since it was a daycare, it was only super basic stuff (J’ai soif! J’ai faim! Je veux jouer avec ça! etc), and I never went to school in French, so even though I sounded like a native, my vocabulary was pretty small, and I was illiterate. Then in high school I took French classes with everyone else, which was easier for me because I had intuitions that other students didn’t, but I had to learn how to read and write with everyone else. We drilled verb conjugations a ton, so I got pretty comfortable with being able to spell identical-sounding verb conjugations correctly (e.g. -er, -é, -ai, -ais, -ait, -aient all pronounced [e] for me), but in lots of other ways my writing still lagged behind my speaking. In college I took 2 French classes (in 2019), and then I took a bit of a break from French until this past September, when I signed up for Alliance Française group classes (they placed me into B2 classes, but I still don’t know if this means they think I am already at B2 or if they think I would be at B2 after finishing the textbook). I got pretty lucky in that the themes of the two chapters we studied at AF were work life and technology, which were topics that came up all over my TCF. Then starting in January I also got a tutor on Preply to specifically drill TCF stuff. He didn’t really seem particularly familiar with the exam, but he was nice and I think helped with my writing and my confidence.

The order of the tests seems to usually be Compréhension Orale, Compréhension Écrite, Expression Écrite, and Expression Orale. A few people had their EO before everything else, but not me. After finishing EÉ, you get your scores for CO and CÉ. They are shown on the screen as the number of points and the CEFR level, but not the NCLC level. (Why? That’s all anyone taking this test cares about?).

I’ve seen lots of people online claiming that unlike in TEF, in TCF any B2 is good enough for NCLC 7, but in CO and CÉ I don’t think this is actually true? From Googling around, it looks to me like 400 is the cutoff for B2 on both CO and CÉ, but for NCLC 7 the cutoff is 458 for CO and 453 for CÉ. Basically, you should try to remember the scores that pop up on the screen after EÉ so you can check if they are actually NCLC 7+.

Compréhension Orale:

I didn’t really understand what the structure of this test would be until I actually did it. Basically, you hear a sound, then the audio passage starts, then you hear the question, and then you have maybe 6-7 seconds to pick a (usually) written multiple choice answer before it will automatically continue on to the next question. You cannot move freely between questions, you cannot choose when the audio starts/stops, and you cannot pause or rewind it. There is a timer for each question, so you do know when it is going to send you to the next question. For the harder questions (which are where most of the points are), the written answer choices are all pretty long, and you have to be able to read very quickly to be able to answer in time. I saw some people online recommending you read the answer choices before listening to the audio, but there’s just no way you would actually have enough time to do that (that would be like less than 2 seconds), and if you try to read the answers while the audio is playing, you will almost certainly miss something in the audio.

In theory, that is how it is supposed to work. In practice, the computers we were using were really not doing well, and the test program froze for me like 10 times during this section. When this happened, the audio continued to play, but the timer froze, which was actually nice, because it meant I got extra time to answer the question after the audio was done. But there was one time the program froze between when the stimulus played and when the question was asked, and that time I had to wait almost a full minute to find out what the question was going to be, by which point I forgot a lot of what I heard. But the audio itself never stalled, which was good I guess. (For the tech nerds – my theory is that there’s a separate process for playing the stimulus audio and another one for playing the question audio, both of which are totally independent of the freeze-prone main process.)

In August (when I first started considering taking this exam) I did a random practice CO test I found on Youtube and got NCLC 7 / B2. Leading up to the test, I did the first 4 practice listening tests on freetcf.com and got NCLC 10 / C1 on all of them. In the actual test, I got 524, which is C1 and barely NCLC 9 (cutoff 523). About 20% of the questions on my test were copied from the 4 practice tests I did on this site. Grinding all 40 of the listening tests here is probably the fastest path to being able to pass this test (the website is free but you do need to make an account).

Compréhension Écrite:

I’m pretty confident in my French reading ability (being an English native speaker is a huge advantage). I did one practice CÉ test on reussir-tcfcanada.com (the first free CÉ test) and did very well. I was so confident on this section that I spent all my prep time on the other sections and figured I could wing CÉ the day of.

The actual exam was much harder than the practice I did, and there were a lot of questions where I really didn’t know what the answer they wanted was. Vocabulary was much more of an issue than I thought it was going to be. In the end I got 525, which is C1 and also barely NCLC 9 (cutoff 524). I finished like 3-4 minutes early, but again the program kept freezing which gave me some extra time. Ironically I think the reading speed required for this test is slower than what you need for the listening test.

As far as the format of the test, it was much more of what I would have expected from a traditional test. There’s an hour long timer you can see, you can spend the time however you want across all the questions, and you can move back and forth between questions as much as you want.

I have also heard that during CÉ you can go back and change your answers for CO. I didn’t test this, but I don’t think it would be very useful since you wouldn’t get to hear the audio again. But the question numbers from CO are listed on the screen above the CÉ question numbers, so it might be possible.

Expression Écrite

As you can probably guess from my background, this test was by far what I was the most worried about. Unlike CÉ and CO, I had no real way of knowing what the expectations were to get 10/20 = NCLC 7, so I really had no idea if my writing was up to par. And since I don’t have my EÉ results yet, I still don’t know!

I prepped for this by doing a practice EÉ exam (almost) every week, then giving what I wrote to my Preply tutor and asking him to correct my spelling and grammar mistakes. Then I put any words I misspelled or misgendered into Anki (a digital flashcard program I use for language learning) and practiced these mistakes every day. At first I got the prompts I was using to practice from a book I bought off of Amazon, but then I found out that reussir-tcfcanada has a free list of recently asked questions by month, which I switched to using.

I got insanely lucky because all 3 of the questions I got asked were ones I had practiced on this site (Février 2026 Combinaison 10, even though I took the test in March?). I basically just rewrote what I had written when I did it for practice, with a few changes to correct spelling/grammar based on what my tutor had told me. (Actually I changed my answer to Tâche 1 pretty significantly because on the practice, my tutor was concerned that I didn’t sufficiently “leur demander de participer à l’organization”.)

This is my practice, what I wrote on the exam was basically this with (hopefully!) fewer spelling mistakes. Once I get my score I’ll report back which should hopefully give the internet more of an idea of what level of writing you need to get NCLC 7 in EÉ.

It sounds like every testing center does basically whatever it wants for the keyboard. I was told that it would be a QWERTY keyboard, and that there would be buttons on the side to use for accented letters. What I was not told, however, is that it was a US-International keyboard. This was a little nice, because it meant I could type é by typing the apostrophe key and then e, which is way faster than having to click on the button, but to type an apostrophe it means you have to press the apostrophe key twice, which will get you two apostrophes (so you have to delete one). This on top of the program freezing several times again (during a freeze it would accept typed input, but wouldn't display what you had typed) was a little painful.

Before each section of the test, there is a video you have to watch that goes over how to use the exam program. It made a big deal about you having to respect the word limit (there is a word counter built-in, but you cannot highlight parts of what you have typed and see how many words you’ve selected), but also about having to do the 3 questions in order. I interpreted that to mean that you wouldn’t be able to go back to tâche 1 when you click on to tâche 2 for example, but then I was able to go back and change my answers, so I don’t know what it was talking about.

Side note: this video showed the date and time it was recorded, because the exam software shows the current date and time, and the date was like May 2016. So maybe part of the reason the program was so broken is because it is literally ten years old.

I’m not gonna lie, I’m gonna be pretty crushed if I fail EÉ after literally practicing with the exact set of questions I was asked. But if I do end up failing the overall exam, it will almost certainly be because of this section.

Expréssion Orale

I’m pretty confident speaking French, so I wasn’t too worried about this section. My only real concern was that some of the topics for tâche 3 are way out there and hard to come up with anything to talk about on the spot (in any language!). But the topics I got were easier to talk about. reussir-tcfcanada also has a list of recent EO questions, and mine were from Février 2026 Partie 11.

When the exam started, the examiner took my photo and had me sign something. Then he started recording and set his phone where I could see the timer, although I never ended up looking at it at all during the test.

For tâche 1, I came up with ideas of things to talk about ahead of time that would force me to use the past, present, and future, but I didn’t memorize a script. I was not interrupted during tâche 1. The examiner was taking notes throughout the time I was talking and I saw he wrote and circled “C1” which I figured was a good sign.

For tâche 2, when I practiced with my tutor, he found some website that gave examples of things to ask about immediately after the prompt. I wasn’t sure if for the real exam I would be given this or not. In the end, there were a few one-word suggestions in parentheses after the question (just like on reussir-tcfcanada). It really just felt like a pretty normal conversation to me. I also saw him write and circle “C1” while I was talking for this task, but like 3 seconds later he crossed it out.

For tâche 3, when I was practicing with my tutor, I was basically trying to speak an essay, which felt very awkward to me and made my speech sound much less fluent. The night before the exam, I rapidfire went through all of the tâche 3 questions for Mars 2026 on reussir-tcfcanada with him, and we just had a quick conversation about each of them. I realized this was way easier and less stressful for me, so that’s what I decided to do on the exam. I basically just rambled on and said anything I could think of that was related to the topic I got. When I finished what ended up being my first major argument, I got asked a question which gave me lots to talk about for the rest of the time. I never really stopped talking.

In retrospect, my big mistake on this task though was that I got so relaxed that I totally forgot to use vous instead of tu. That will probably prevent me from getting the NCLC 9 I got on the multiple choice parts, but I will frankly be pretty shocked if I didn’t get at least NCLC 7 on EO. I’ll update this post once I get my EO score as well.

Edit: Since this post got removed, I don't know if anyone can see it, but just in case, I figure I would give my promised update:

I got 13 on EÉ, which is NCLC 8 and B2. I got 15 on EO, which is NCLC 9 and C1. I got my results at around 7-8 in the evening on March 23, so 9 days after my exam.

Can someone explain the abszolút filmszínház meme?

[LONG] My Experience Taking TCF Canada (March 2026)