French — Exams
The hard half of a French oral is catching what the examiner just said.
The DELF B2 gives you thirty minutes with a document, then twenty minutes presenting it and holding it against an examiner who counters at full speed, contracts every ne and phrases the objection once. The counter you did not quite hear is the one that sinks the answer.
These five ask for five different jobs, and each one puts a different demand on your ear.
Defending a point of view
DELF B2 hands you a short trigger article and half an hour. Then you speak for five to seven minutes and spend the next ten or more being contradicted. Rehearse that second half: the concession, the rebuttal, the certes, mais.
The exposé from a dossier
DALF C1 gives you an hour with several documents and expects an ordered exposé of eight to ten minutes, then a debate with the jury. The marks are for structure and for holding a line, not for having read widely.
Questioning the examiner
Both the TCF and the TEF hand you the interrogator's role — an advertisement in the TEF, an everyday situation in the TCF. Est-ce que, inversion or plain intonation: you pick one, keep the register steady, and keep producing questions until the time is up.
Speaking with no preparation
The TCF opens with a two-minute directed interview and closes with a spontaneous opinion, neither of them prepared. There is no thinking time to hide in — you answer on the first hearing, or not at all.
Settling a problem out loud
DELF B1 puts you in a role-play where you and the examiner have to resolve something: a complaint, a cancellation, a change of plan. It runs on conditional forms and polite formulas, produced while the examiner is still improvising the problem.
The grid rewards things that exist only in speech — rhythm, liaison, the connector that arrives on time.
None of it is secret; the descriptors are published. The write-up after each session tells you which line you kept falling off.
- Catching the question first time, since examiners link and contract like everyone else, and answering a question you half heard costs more than a wrong tense.
- Il faut que, bien que, pour que and the subjunctive that has to follow — usually the form you know cold and produce one beat too late.
- Passé composé against imparfait under pressure, where j'ai parlé and je parlais are separated by a single vowel and nothing else.
- Connectors that carry an argument — certes, en revanche, dans la mesure où, quitte à — reached for early enough to shape what follows.
- Pronunciation and rhythm, which carry their own line on the marking grid and are the one thing silent revision never touches.
- Holding your turn in French while you think, since a gap of silence is an invitation for the examiner to move on.
Start with ten minutes
Nothing to book, and a written report at the end of the first session.
Try 10 minutes freeAbout that score
There is no examiner here, no jury, no official grid and no certificate. We are not France Éducation international or the CCI, and our number carries none of their authority — read it as a rough gauge, not a forecast. Use the sessions instead to make an objection at full speed feel ordinary rather than startling.