You understand far more than you can say.

Most of the people who book are not beginners. They have done the apps, sometimes for years. They have lived in France, or with a French person, or with a stack of French films. They can read a menu, follow a conversation, catch the joke a beat late. And they cannot say what they mean when it counts. They call it freezing, or blanking, or "my French just goes". They tend to think it is a confidence problem, or a grammar problem, or a them problem.

It is none of those. It is the most normal thing in language learning, it has a clear mechanism, and it is the specific thing this coaching is built to fix.

What is actually happening in the two seconds before you speak

Understanding and speaking are different skills stored in different ways. Understanding is recognition: a word arrives, and you know it. Speaking is retrieval: you need the word, and you have to find it, in the right form, in order, in about a second, while also listening to the other person and managing your face. Recognition is easy to build, and everything you have done so far built it. Retrieval only builds when you retrieve. Reading and listening, however much of it you do, do not train the muscle you are trying to use.

Then there is the monitor. Adults who understand a language well have a very good ear for what is wrong, so they hear their own mistake before it leaves their mouth and stop to fix it. Do that three times in one sentence and the sentence never arrives. Children do not do this; they say the broken version and keep going, which is why they sound fluent before they are correct. You need to borrow a little of that.

And the third thing: building the sentence in English first. If you assemble the perfect English answer and then translate it, you have given yourself a job that takes ten seconds in a conversation that gives you one. Most freezing is not a lack of French. It is an English sentence that was too good to translate in time.

What we work on

Retrieval, under gentle pressure, in a room where a mistake costs nothing. Everything in the session is designed so that you are the one talking, most of the time, about your own life, and so that the same sentence shapes come back until they are automatic.

The simple version, said now

The first habit we build is saying the sentence you can make instead of the one you want. Je pense que c’est une bonne idée when your English brain is drafting a paragraph about the pros and cons. The simple version, said immediately, keeps the conversation alive and buys you the next sentence. The elegant version comes later, and it comes because you were talking.

Buying time in French

Silence while you think reads as being lost. French people fill that gap with sounds and small words, and so will you. They are not cheating. They are how the language is spoken.

Repairing instead of stopping

You will get a word wrong. The question is whether the sentence survives it. We practise carrying on: enfin, je veux dire… and then the fix, without the apology and without the pause. Once the fear of a mistake mid-sentence is gone, most of the freezing goes with it.

A small engine, used constantly

Most spoken French runs on a few dozen verbs in the present tense and the passé composé, plus il faut, je voudrais, on peut and a handful of connectors. You know all of them. You have never had them at speed. A good part of every session is those forms, in your sentences, about your week, until they come out before you have decided to say them.

Hearing yourself change

In the first week you record one minute on a prompt. In the last week you record the same prompt. We listen to both together. People rarely believe how much has changed until they hear it, and then they cannot un-hear it.

What changes, and when

• After 8 sessions: the freeze has a shape you can see coming, and a way out. You answer simple questions immediately, in French, without routing through English. The boulangerie is fine.
• After 16: you hold a ten-minute conversation about your life, your work and your opinions, with mistakes and without stopping. You correct yourself and keep going.
• After 24: you are the person you are in English, in French, most of the time. Slower, plainer, sometimes funnier. Present.

Sessions are fifty minutes, one to one, at a fixed weekly time on Google Meet, in the UK evening. Between sessions there is a short voice task with a personal reply, and a written note of the three things we fixed. The longer explanation of the gap, and what to do about it on your own, is in this guide. Prices are on the programmes page.