The shape of this course
Paper 1
Listening
25%
~50 min · 40 marks · heard twice
Paper 2
Reading
25%
1 hour · 45 marks
Paper 3
Speaking
25%
~10 min · 40 marks · role play + 2 conversations
Paper 4
Writing
25%
1 hour · 45 marks
Where the marks actually go missing
Four papers, 25% each. No weighting to hide behind. And that is the whole
strategic problem in one line: half your grade is Listening and Speaking —
the two skills you cannot practise quietly at a desk with a textbook.
Almost everyone pours their time into reading and writing, because those feel like studying.
So the marks most at risk are the ones least likely to get attention. This section is built to
push against that.
The other thing worth knowing: the target is A2 with elements of B1 —
“communicate effectively in familiar everyday situations”. That is a finite,
learnable amount of language. French at this level is mostly a volume problem, and volume
problems respond to systems.
Recognising is not producing
You can already read far more French than you can say or write. That gap is the single most
common shape for a student at your stage, and it is not a sign of being bad at French —
it is a sign of having practised in one direction only.
So the drills below run English → French, which is three or four times
harder and is the direction the exam actually needs. They also time you, because an answer that
takes eight seconds is not usable in a ten-minute conversation.
Daily drills — the engine room
Over 1000 items from the syllabus vocabulary list plus 161 ready-made phrases, drilled
English → French with spaced repetition. Nouns always carry their article, because
gender learned separately never sticks. An item only counts as mastered once you can produce it
quickly. French audio on every answer.
68 verbs across the seven tenses you must produce — and it always tells you whether a verb
takes être or avoir in the perfect, which is the most expensive accuracy
error at this level. The passive and subjunctive are covered as recognition only, exactly as the
syllabus requires.
74 sentences in 8 graded sets. You hear it, you type it, and a word-by-word diff shows exactly
what your ear missed. Comprehension questions let you guess from context; dictation cannot be
guessed, which is why it finds things nothing else does — silent endings, liaison, numbers.
The four papers
🎤
Speaking Kit — Paper 3
›
8 full role plays, 35 conversation questions each shown twice — once as a bare answer and
once developed for the top band, with the added marks highlighted — tense frames that work
in any topic, and 31 recovery phrases. “Je ne sais pas” ends a conversation and
scores nothing; a filler keeps it alive.
✍️
Writing Guide — Paper 4
›
All three tasks: form-filling, directed writing, and the email or article. Models in French with
English glosses, weak-versus-strong comparisons, register (tu or vous) and the
12 errors English speakers reliably make.
📖
Reading practice paper — Paper 2
›
A full 45-mark paper in Cambridge’s six-group shape, with short answers in French. Every
wrong option is explained — including the true-but-not-the-answer traps, which is how
Cambridge builds its distractors.
🎧
Listening practice paper — Paper 1
›
A full 40-mark, 37-question paper spoken by your Mac. Two plays per clip as in the real exam,
with an override for practice. Full transcripts revealed afterwards, because seeing what you
missed is the entire point.
Unit Assessment — Studying and working
🎯
Unit Exam 1 — Studying and working
›
90 minutes, 50 marks, all production. Section A: school and work vocabulary English → French,
article required. Section B: imperfect, conditional, quand + future, negations, inversion,
possessive and disjunctive pronouns, years in words. Section C: 80–100 words on career plans, marked
against a 15-point checklist with weak / middling / strong exemplars. Every model answer names the classic error.
🎯
Unit Exam 2 — Studying and working
›
A second full paper, same shape, all-new items — so the first one can be marked, learned from,
and the second sat cold. Deliberately harder than the school paper will be.
About the audio. Everything spoken here uses the French voice built into macOS —
nothing loads from anyone’s servers and it works offline. Be aware that it is
cleaner than a real exam recording, which has two speakers, natural speed and background
noise. It is excellent for training your ear on endings and liaison; it is not a substitute for
real French audio. If a voice is missing, go to
System Settings › Accessibility › Spoken Content › System Voice › Manage Voices
and add Thomas or Amélie.
Also here
📚
French Comprehensive Study Guide
›
The earlier guide, kept as it was.
How to use this well: fifteen minutes of Production Lab and one dictation set
every day will do more than two hours at the weekend. Language is the one subject where little
and often genuinely beats long sessions — you are building automatic recall, and that only
comes from repeated retrieval spread over time.