The French you need in the first three months, before you land.

People plan a move to France around the big things: the job, the flat, the school, the visa. The French tends to get filed under "I will pick it up when I am there". It is a reasonable plan and it almost never works, for a reason nobody warns you about. The first three months are the months with the most admin and the least French. You arrive, and before you have learned anything, the country needs you to open a bank account, register with a doctor, sign a lease, set up electricity, answer letters and take calls, each one in French, each one with something at stake.

So you do what everyone does. You get through it in English where you can, with a helpful colleague, with your phone held up to a letter. It works, mostly. And it quietly builds you an English-shaped life that is very hard to climb out of later. The people who arrive with a hundred sentences already in their mouth have a completely different first year. That is the whole point of doing this before you go.

What the first months actually ask of you

Not literature. Not the subjunctive. A narrow, very repetitive kind of French, done under mild pressure, often with someone who is busy. In rough order of when it hits:

• The appointment: the bank, the prefecture, the mairie, the doctor. Arriving, saying why you are there, handing over documents, understanding what is missing and when to come back.
• The phone: the call about your dossier, the delivery that cannot find your door, the electricity company. No faces, no gestures, a lot of numbers and dates.
• The letter: from the CAF, from ameli, from your landlord. Knowing which ones matter and what they are asking you to do by when.
• The counter: the pharmacy, the post office, the boulangerie at 8am with a queue behind you. Short, fast, formulaic, and the place where your confidence is decided every single day.
• The neighbours and the colleagues: the bit that makes it a life rather than a relocation. It comes last, and it needs the other four to have stopped taking all your energy.

What we work on

Your move, in the order it will happen. At the free conversation we look at your date, your city, your job and your level, and lay the sessions along the timeline. If you leave in six months, we start with what happens in week one and work outward. If you have already landed, we start with whatever is on your desk this week.

The appointment, rehearsed

Every session has a scene from your list. The bank appointment: what they will ask, what you say, what justificatif de domicile means and why they want three of them. You play you. Ceyda plays the person behind the desk, at the real speed, with the real vocabulary, and stops only to fix the things that would actually cost you.

Understanding what comes back

Most people prepare what they will say and freeze at the reply. So half of every scene is listening: the three ways an official says "you need to come back", the difference between il manque and il faut, the numbers and dates said fast. By the time you are in the real chair, you have heard the reply forty times.

Polite without being stiff

French administration runs on a register that English speakers tend to get slightly wrong in both directions: too casual, or so formal it sounds like a complaint. Bonjour before anything else, vous to everyone behind a counter, je vous remercie rather than merci beaucoup at the end of a formal exchange. Small things. They change how you are treated, and we make them automatic.

The phone, on purpose

We do part of some sessions with cameras off. It is uncomfortable, and it is the fastest way to stop being afraid of an unknown number. You learn to slow the other person down without apologising for it: Vous pouvez répéter la date, s’il vous plaît ? is not a failure. It is what French people say too.

The level the paperwork asks for

Since 1 January 2026, France attaches language levels to residence: A2 for a first multi-year residence permit, B1 for a ten-year carte de résident, B2 for citizenship, with a civic exam alongside. If any of those is on your horizon, your French has a deadline whether you chose one or not. The full picture, with what each level means in practice and how it is proven, is in this guide. The short version: the coaching gets you to the speaking part of those levels; a certificate needs an exam, and we will tell you which one.

What changes, and when

• After 8 sessions: you handle the counter and the appointment. You arrive, explain, understand the reply and know what to do next. You take a simple call.
• After 16: you deal with a problem, not just a process. The delivery that did not come, the charge you do not recognise, the appointment that needs moving. You read your post without translating it.
• After 24: you have neighbours you talk to and a colleague you have lunch with in French. The admin is background noise, which is what it is for everyone else.

Sessions are fifty minutes, one to one, at a fixed weekly time on Google Meet, in the UK evening, which suits most of Europe. Between sessions you get a written note and a short voice task. Prices and programme lengths are on the programmes page.