Meetings, trips and colleagues. French you can use on Tuesday.

Two kinds of people book this. The first works with French people: colleagues in a Paris office, a client in Lyon, a supplier in Toulouse, a parent company with a very French board. The meetings are officially in English, and unofficially they slide into French the moment things get interesting. The second travels to France a lot, for work or not, and has reached the point where being handled in English by every waiter and receptionist feels like being kept outside.

Both have the same problem, and it is a specific one. Their French is fine for the first thirty seconds and collapses under two things: speed, and the fear of looking less competent in a second language than they are in their first. Nobody wants to be the senior person who sounds like a beginner. So they stay quiet, or they switch to English, and the French people, being polite, switch with them. Everyone ends up speaking the language that keeps you slightly outside.

The switch problem

This is the thing to solve first, because it decides whether anything else you learn gets used. French people switch to English for three reasons: to be kind, to be efficient, and, occasionally, to show they can. The way to stop it is not better grammar. It is a short, confident sentence that tells them you would like to stay in French, and then staying in French even when it is slower.

What we work on

Your calendar, essentially. At the free conversation we look at the next month: which meetings, which trip, which dinner. Then we build the sessions backwards from those. A few things come up for nearly everyone.

Before the meeting

The five minutes of small talk before the agenda is where relationships are actually made in France, and where an English speaker who only prepared the business part gets lost. The train, the weather, the weekend, the thing in the news. Light, fast, and full of the idioms nobody teaches. We practise it as a genre, not as vocabulary, so you can hold the five minutes without a script.

Following the discussion, and asking for it back

You will lose the thread at some point in a real meeting. Everyone does. The skill is losing it gracefully: asking for the last point again, checking you have understood a decision, summarising what you heard in one sentence so someone can correct you. These three moves make you look careful rather than lost, and they are the same three sentences every time.

Saying your piece

Your opinion, your objection, your recommendation, in French that is direct without being blunt. French professional culture disagrees more openly than British culture and softens it differently. Je ne suis pas sûr que ce soit la bonne approche lands; a bare non does not, and neither does the English habit of burying the point in so many hedges that nobody notices it was made.

The dinner, the hotel, the train

The trip around the meeting. Checking in, the taxi that takes the long way, the restaurant where you would like to order what you actually want and ask what andouillette is before it arrives. This is where most people first feel the difference: the evening after a meeting in France, in French, is a different evening.

Formal without being stiff

Business French has a reputation for stiffness that is mostly the fault of business French courses. Real professional French is vous and a handful of set phrases at the edges of the exchange, with ordinary, fairly relaxed French in the middle. We make the edges automatic, so you can spend your attention on the middle.

What changes, and when

• After 8 sessions: the small talk before the meeting, the trip around it, and one clean contribution inside it. People stop switching to English for you.
• After 16: you follow a full discussion, ask for what you missed without embarrassment, and put your point across in a way that survives disagreement.
• After 24: you run part of a meeting in French, take a client to dinner without a safety net, and are known as the one who speaks French, which in a French company is worth more than most qualifications.

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, usually built on the meeting you actually have that week, and a note of what we fixed. Prices are on the programmes page; several people have had the cost covered by an employer’s training budget, and we can provide what finance needs.