French — Français
French on the page has spaces between the words; spoken French does not.
The difficulty starts at the listening end. Vous êtes arrives as a single word, il n'y a personne as ya personne, and most of the endings you learned to read are silent — so the reply lands as one unbroken run and the sense arrives a beat late. FluentPass puts you in front of French said at that speed, and writes up what you missed and what you mangled.
Almost all of it comes from one place: French does not sound the way it looks, and it does not pause between words.
Liaison and enchaînement erase word boundaries
On the page, les amis ont attendu is four words; out loud it is one run of sound. Silent consonants wake up as liaisons; in elle arrive, the l you pronounce slides onto the vowel. You have to produce that, not just decode it.
Most verb endings sound identical
Je parle, tu parles, il parle and ils parlent are all pronounced the same. Person and number survive only in the pronoun — or in a liaison, when the verb starts with a vowel — so a swallowed ils leaves your listener guessing.
The ne drops out in speech
Written French negates with ne and pas. Ordinary speech drops the ne — je sais pas, y a personne — and compresses what is left, so the sentence you rehearsed from a textbook sounds stiff and the one you hear sounds unfamiliar.
Object pronouns go before the verb
French puts clitic pronouns in front of the verb in a fixed order: me, te, le, lui, y, en. In the positive imperative they flip behind it — donne-le-moi. Assembling either sequence in real time is hard; hearing one arrive as a single blurred syllable is harder.
Three ways to ask one question
Inversion (viendrez-vous), est-ce que, and plain rising intonation (vous venez) are all correct, but they sit in different registers. Choosing between them mid-conversation, in front of a stranger you have decided to vouvoyer, is a decision the page never forces on you.
On every test below there is a live examiner in the room, and you have to understand them first time.
One hands you a dossier and an hour with it; another has you questioning the examiner within a minute of sitting down. What they share is somebody speaking at full speed from the first sentence.
DELF B1
Three parts run back to back: a directed interview about your life, a role-play settling a problem with the examiner, and a point of view on a random topic, the only part you get ten minutes to prepare.
DELF B2
Thirty minutes alone with a short trigger text, then twenty with the examiner: five to seven minutes putting a point of view and the rest defending it. The debate half, not the prepared half, is where most candidates come unstuck.
DALF C1
An hour of preparation on a dossier of documents, then a thirty-minute oral: an exposé of eight to ten minutes built out of them and a debate with the jury. You are judged on how you structure an argument.
TCF (Test de connaissance du français)
Set by France Éducation international: twelve minutes, three tasks, face to face with an examiner who records you for a second marker — a directed interview, a role-play in which you ask the questions, and a spontaneous opinion.
TEF (Test d'évaluation de français)
Fifteen minutes with an examiner, in two unequal parts, run by the CCI Paris Île-de-France. First, five minutes extracting information about an advertisement by questioning them; then ten minutes trying to convince them of something.
What are you practising for?
Start with ten minutes
Nothing to book, and a written report at the end of the first session.
Try 10 minutes freeLimits worth stating
Nothing here is an examination. We mark you ourselves; France Éducation international and the CCI have no part in it, and our number tells you nothing about what theirs would say. There is no beginner course behind it either — you need enough French to build a sentence before anyone can correct one. What remains is the repetition, at speed, and a written record of what you missed.