Guide
Moving to France: the French you actually need
The French you need to settle in France is not the French of a textbook. It is narrow, repetitive, and concentrated in about six situations — most of them administrative, all of them survivable with a B1 that has been trained on the right things.
In short
- The hard part is rarely conversation. It is administration, where the vocabulary is narrow but unforgiving.
- Six recurring situations carry most of the first year: paperwork, housing, bank, health, school, work.
- On the phone you lose the face, the gestures and the context. It is the hardest exercise, and the one worth rehearsing first.
- Children learn the language of the playground fast and the language of school slowly. The two are not the same, and only the second is graded.
The six situations that decide the first year
- Paperwork. Counters, forms, appointments, missing documents. The vocabulary is small and fixed — and almost none of it is taught in ordinary courses.
- Housing. Visits, guarantors, inventories, deposits, repairs. Here you must understand precisely, because you sign.
- Bank and bills. Opening an account, direct debits, disputing a charge. Highly scripted conversations, easy to rehearse.
- Health. Booking, describing a symptom, understanding a prescription. Describing pain in a second language is genuinely hard and worth practising before you need it.
- School. Enrolment, notes from teachers, parents' evenings, the report card and its vocabulary.
- Work. Interviews, contracts, meetings, and the written politeness of French professional e-mail, which is a genre of its own.
The telephone is the real wall
Face to face, you have the person's expression, their gestures, and the shared situation to lean on. On the phone all of that disappears, the sound quality is worse, and the person on the other end speaks at their normal speed because they cannot see that you are struggling.
It is also the situation you cannot avoid: appointments, deliveries, administration. Rehearsing three or four phone scripts — booking, cancelling, asking someone to repeat, spelling your name — removes most of the difficulty, because these calls are far more scripted than they feel.
If children are coming too
Children pick up the playground very fast — often within months — and this reassures everyone. The language of school is another matter: instructions, subject vocabulary, written work. It takes longer, it is not visible in conversation, and it is the one that is graded.
The useful move is not to wait for the school to signal a problem. A child who speaks fluently in the yard and loses marks on written work is not lazy — they are missing the school register, and that is teachable.
What to work on, in what order
Three months before leaving, the priority is not grammar. It is:
- the vocabulary of the six situations above, in the words actually used at a counter rather than in a textbook;
- telephone practice, out loud, with someone playing the other side;
- understanding fast, imperfect speech — because that is what you will get;
- reading an official letter without panic, which is mostly a matter of recognising a dozen recurring formulas.
Procedures are not described here
This guide is about the language, not the administration. Which documents are required, which office handles what and what the deadlines are change regularly and depend on your situation — the relevant authority and the official site are the only sources that count.
Prepare the situations, not the syllabus
A departure has a date, and a date makes a plan possible: which situations come first, how many lessons before you leave, and what can wait until you are there. That is a very different course from « continue at your level », and a far more useful one in the months before a move.
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