Y a un souci, faut qu'on voie ça — meeting French is not the French of the report.

Not the whole language — the handful of situations where a half-second of decoding is visible to everyone in the room.

• Being asked to justify a figure

  You describe a project you led, and then somebody picks one number out of it and asks how you arrived at it. Dates, quantities and who decided what, in the passé composé with the imparfait behind it — and the question itself said quickly, once.

• The only non-native in the room

  A meeting in Paris or Brussels runs at its own pace. The skill being tested is getting in politely — je me permets de revenir sur — and having a sentence repeated without the discussion carrying on without you.

• A viva or a soutenance

  Defending a thesis in France means a prepared exposé and then a long stretch of questions from a jury that phrases each one once, at its own speed. Answer the question actually asked, in whole sentences, without your notes.

• French down a phone line

  A telephone leaves you nothing but sound, which is exactly where liaison and the dropped ne do their damage. Asking twice starts to cost you something, so catching a name, a figure or a date on the first pass is the skill.

• Working in Quebec French

  Offices in Montreal run on Quebec French, which reaches for tu far earlier than France does and carries its own workplace vocabulary. If you learned in Europe, expect the register to be the surprise rather than the grammar.

Two registers at once — vous for the person in front of you, and the contracted French everybody actually speaks.

Nobody at work corrects a foreign colleague's French, and an interviewer will never tell you which sentence lost them. You find out here or not at all.

• Catching a question thrown across the table at full speed, contractions and all, so that your answer starts on time rather than after a pause.
• Vous and its verb forms kept up for a whole hour, imperative included, without sliding into tu the moment the discussion turns friendly.
• Il me semble que, je ne suis pas certain que, on pourrait envisager de — the softeners French reaches for where English would simply say no.
• Quatre-vingt-dix-sept, a budget, a date: numbers built out of arithmetic and said once, in a room where nobody repeats them for your benefit.
• Reporting past work in the passé composé and the imparfait, since the passé simple you know from reading is not spoken — and relaying somebody else's decision, il a dit que, with the tense shift that forces.
• Rescuing a sentence you began badly — enfin, plutôt, disons — instead of scrapping it and going back to the beginning.

The part we cannot help with

No employer, no admissions committee and no immigration office is on the other end of this, and the score stays with us. Nor does it know your field: the terminology of your trade arrives with you. It also starts from French you already have, since there is nothing to correct until you can build the sentence yourself.