Frequently asked questions

Partly. The Learning Center covers levels A1 through C2, and a good number of guides are written for people who know almost no French. But this site is not a course that walks you from zero to fluent in a fixed order. It is a reference library plus a daily reading habit, built for English speakers who are dealing with real French situations: renting, banking, working, travelling, following the news.

If you have never studied French at all, start with the guides tagged A1 in the Learning Center and read them in whatever order matches what you are actually about to do.

Take the free Level Quiz. It is 20 questions and gives you a CEFR estimate from A0 to C2, plus a read on what to fix first. There is a longer 50 question version if you want a more precise placement. Neither requires an account, and both are free.

One honest caveat: a quiz is a snapshot, not a diagnosis. If your result surprises you in either direction, trust the reading you do over the next month more than the number.

No. We used to, and older pages on the internet may still say otherwise. That offer no longer exists and there is no trial lesson, no weekly one-to-one and no booking system.

What replaced it is written: free guides, a daily news section written at readable levels, and one paid book. If you want live conversation practice, an in-person tutor or an italki-style marketplace will serve you better than we can.

No. Every free part of the site works without signing up. You only give an email if you choose to receive The Briefing, or if you want your quiz result sent to you. Buying the book goes through a checkout, which needs an email for delivery, and nothing more.

Most of the site. The Learning Center guides, the French Briefing and its comprehension quizzes, the Level Quiz, the downloadable PDFs on the Resources page, and the book recommendations in the Library. No paywall, no article limit, no account.

French news explained for English speakers. Each edition takes one real story from France, explains the context an outsider would miss, and teaches the vocabulary that story actually uses. Every edition ends with a comprehension quiz so you can check whether you followed it or merely recognised the words.

It is free and it lives at /news/. You can read it in the browser without subscribing to anything.

Irregularly, and we would rather say that than invent a schedule. The Briefing follows what is actually happening in France, and the Learning Center grows when a guide is worth writing rather than on a calendar. If you want to be told when something lands, the email form on the Briefing and Learning Center pages is the way.

For classroom use, yes, with attribution and a link. Republishing the text on another site is not fine. If you are unsure, ask us rather than guess.

A book built around the twenty-one mistakes English speakers make most often in French. It is written as a gamebook: you make a choice, you see the consequence, you learn why the natural-sounding option was wrong. It exists as a PDF and as a printed book you can order from Amazon.

The full description and current prices are on the product page.

Yes. Thirty days, no questions. If the book does not do what you expected, ask and you get your money back. That guarantee is the reason we do not pad the sales page with claims we cannot support.

Printed copies bought through Amazon follow Amazon's own returns policy, not ours.

Not yet. The Pass is a membership we are building around daily immersion: audio, reading at your level, speaking follow-up and progress tracking. The Pass page describes what it will include and takes waitlist signups.

It is not purchasable today and we have not set a launch date. When there is one, the people on the waitlist hear first. We would rather tell you it is unfinished than sell you a date we might miss.

Fair question, and the honest answer is that the guides pay for themselves in reputation rather than in sales. Most of them mention the book once at the end and never in the middle of an explanation. If you never buy anything, the Learning Center still works exactly as well.

A small editorial team of French teachers and writers, working from France. Guides go through a factual check before publication, and administrative or legal points are sourced to the official French government pages, which we link at the bottom of the relevant article.

When something we published turns out to be wrong or out of date, we correct the article rather than quietly delete it.

Metropolitan French, the French of France. Where Québécois, Belgian or Swiss usage differs in a way that would actually trip you up, we say so explicitly and flag which country the phrasing belongs to. We do not present one variety as correct and the others as quaint.

Every email we send carries an unsubscribe link that works immediately and needs no explanation from you. If it ever fails, tell us and we will remove you by hand.

Use the contact page. Broken links, a translation that does not sound right, an administrative fact that has changed: all of it is useful, and corrections get made faster than you would expect.