French syllabus: CEFR levels, and the grammar that decides yours

The four things that decide your level

1. Gender, learnt with the noun and never after. It changes the article, the adjective and often the past participle. *-tion*, *-sion*, *-té*, *-ance*, *-ence* are feminine; *-age*, *-ment*, *-eau*, *-isme* are masculine, and the exceptions are famous because they are few.
2. The two past tenses, which is the B1 gate. *Passé composé* for a finished event, *imparfait* for what was going on or used to happen. The test is aspect, not time — did it happen, or was it happening. Getting this wrong is the clearest sign of an A2 candidate writing at B1.
3. Pronouns and their order. *Le, la, les, lui, leur, y, en*, placed before the verb — which is what makes French sound French. *Je le lui ai donné.* Learning the fixed sequence is worth one evening.
4. The subjunctive, a B2 marker. Triggered by will, emotion, doubt and necessity — *il faut que*, *je veux que*, *bien que*, *avant que*. You do not need every form; you need *que* plus the present subjunctive of common verbs, produced once or twice in an exam piece. Examiners notice its absence.

Compréhension de l'oral

The difficulty is not vocabulary; it is that spoken French joins its words together. *Les amis* is *lezami*; *il est allé* is *ilétalé*; *je ne sais pas* becomes *chais pas*. None of that is slang — it is how the language is spoken, including in the recording.

• Read every question before the audio and underline what each asks for — a number, a reason, an opinion, a time.
• Split the two hearings: first for what you can get, second for what you could not.
• Drill numbers separately — *soixante-dix*, *quatre-vingts*, *quatre-vingt-dix* are where whole answers go wrong.
• Ten minutes of French radio a day beats an hour a week. This is ear training, and ear training is frequency.

Compréhension des écrits

• Answer from the document, not from what you know. If the text says the office opens at nine, the answer is nine.
• Expect reformulation. The question will use a synonym — *interdit* in the text becomes *ne peut pas* in the question — and finding that link is the skill being tested.
• True/false with justification: both halves score. Copy the exact proving line; do not paraphrase it.
• Learn the connectives, because at B2 the questions are about relationships between ideas: *cependant*, *néanmoins*, *donc*, *par conséquent*, *bien que*, *en revanche*.

Production écrite and orale

• At A2–B1, a letter or message: open correctly, state your purpose in the first sentence, do the three things the prompt asked, close correctly. Learn one formal closing formula and reuse it.
• At B2, an argued text: introduction with your position, two or three developed arguments each with an example, a conceded counter-argument (*Certes… mais…*), and a conclusion. The concession is expected and its absence is noticed.
• Respect the word count, which is stated and marked.
• For the oral, prepare functional phrases rather than scripts, and learn repair phrases — *comment dire…*, *c'est-à-dire…* — because talking your way around a word you do not know is exactly the skill being assessed.

Check your writing in this order: verb endings, agreement, articles and genders, accents. Those four are where nearly all the correctable errors are.

The French nobody teaches you and everybody needs

Course books teach the café and the railway station. The French that decides your first month in France is administrative, and it appears in the reading paper at B1 and above as well as at the préfecture: *titre de séjour*, *récépissé*, *justificatif de domicile*, *attestation*, *dossier*, *caution*, *garant*, *état des lieux*, *résilier*, *relevé de notes*, *convention de stage*.

Twenty such terms, learnt as phrases you could actually say at a counter, serve you in the exam and in the life afterwards.