You’ve got the bases down. You’ve studied the grammar rules and conjugated your fair share of verbs in your time, getting yourself to an intermediate level. Pas mal! You can be proud of having reached this point.

But right now, you’re stuck in a funny place with your language-learning journey. You can understand a decent chunk of that email, news article, textbook exercise, or slower-paced podcast you just consumed. But as soon as “reality” hits with the genuine pace, complexity and nuance of the spoken language, you’re completely lost without a transcript. In social settings (think: fast-paced parties or dinners), everything blurs into background noise.

The reality is that real-life spoken French sounds different to anything you’ve ever learned in a textbook. Whether it’s the slang, shortcuts, or sophisticated sentence structure, suddenly, you end up spending all of your mental energy just trying to keep up, let alone formulate an impressive sentence in French.

And this is one of the core reasons why you still freeze when it comes to actually speaking meaningful French (above and beyond “un croissant, s’il vous plaît?”).

It can be frustrating, because you actually know A LOT of French, but understanding and speaking the language just doesn’t seem to click into place in the real world. And because of this, people think that you’re much more of a beginner than you really are - cue them awkwardly switching to English 🙄.

So, what’s going on?!