Starting French from zero, with an exam date on the calendar

When I decided to take the TCF Canada, I wasn't "a bit rusty". I was a beginner. The goal was clear — CLB 7 for Express Entry — but the road from bonjour to writing a 150-word argument in French felt impossibly long.

Everything arrives at once

French doesn't let you learn one thing at a time. In my first weeks, a single sentence asked me to know:

• whether a noun was le or la — with no rule I could see,
• how to conjugate the verb, and which of five tenses I needed,
• where the accents went, and whether a or à was right,
• and, for the exam, how to sound natural rather than translated.

I kept looking up the same words again and again. I'd check a verb table on Monday and need it again on Thursday. Nothing I looked up stayed with me, because nothing came back to me.

The exam is writing and speaking at length

Grammar books prepared me for exercises. The TCF asks for something else: a message, an article, an argued opinion, a ten-minute conversation. The first time I timed myself on a writing task, I spent most of it searching for words, and I had no idea which of my mistakes mattered.

I didn't need more material. I needed to know what I kept getting wrong — and to see it again until it was fixed.

What finally worked

1. A short lesson before practice. Ten minutes on one grammar point, then exercises on exactly that point.
2. Writing and speaking every day, even badly, at real exam length.
3. A list of my own mistakes — not textbook mistakes, mine — reviewed after one, three and seven days.
4. Saving the words I looked up, so they came back as practice instead of disappearing into my browser history.

None of this is new advice. The hard part was doing it consistently when everything lived in different places. That's what the next post is about.

If you're starting from zero too

Start with the present tense, être and avoir, articles and genders, and simple questions — the A1 lessons cover exactly that. Write three sentences a day about your own life. Keep every correction. It adds up faster than it feels.

— Asma