Who writes this

What this is for

There is no shortage of writing about learning French and a real shortage of writing that says where its numbers came from. Search almost any question in this subject and you will find confident tables of hours, months and levels, passed between sites until they acquire the texture of research, with no source under any of them.

This notebook exists to answer the same questions with the sources attached. It is organised around a specific claim: that French is unusually generous in vocabulary and unusually expensive in listening, that almost all beginner material hides this, and that knowing it changes what you should spend your evenings and your money on.

It is written for learners. Nothing here is about teaching French, running a school, or selling a course — a different job with different questions.

How a page gets written

A page starts from a question people actually ask, and the first job is finding out what can be sourced. Every price is read off the vendor's own page rather than a review, on a stated day, with the term recorded — whether it is monthly, annual, one-time, what it renews at, and whether a countdown or a sale banner was running at the time.

What cannot be read is not filled in from elsewhere. On the day these pages were written, one vendor published no price at all to a plain request, and two served prices in currencies other than the one asked for. Each of those became a sentence saying so, because what actually happened is more useful to a reader than a tidy number that might be wrong in their country.

Figures about the language itself come from bodies that publish them and are named each time: the US Foreign Service Institute for language-difficulty categories, Statistics Canada for the census, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie for speaker counts — with a note that the OIF exists to promote French as well as to count it. Where a body publishes nothing, the pages say that instead of borrowing a figure that looks official.

The charts are built from the same numbers as the sentences beside them, from the same source of truth, and the build fails if the two ever disagree. That is not a flourish: a drawing that contradicts its own page is one of the easiest errors to ship and one of the hardest to notice.

Rules this notebook holds itself to

No timeline to fluency. Nobody publishes one for a self-taught adult, and the one published difficulty figure that does exist describes full-time government students reaching a professional standard — quoted with those qualifiers wherever it appears, never multiplied out into your evenings.

No scores out of ten. Scoring implies a controlled trial of courses, none has been run here, and an invented number is worse than an argument you can check. Products are described by what they are built to do.

No commission rates, cookie windows or network names for the companies linked. For most of them the only available terms come from directories that contradict each other, and repeating one would make a guess look like a finding.

No exam facts from anywhere but the issuing body. France Éducation international administers the DELF and DALF; its site could not be read from here on 24 September 2026, so this site states no fee, format or eligibility rule for those diplomas at all.

No guarantees of anything — a pass, a job, a level or fluency — and no claim that any product produces them.

What it will not publish

It will not run coupon or discount-code pages, which are profitable, thin, stale within weeks, and in several programmes actively harmful to the buyer because an unapproved code can void their purchase.

It will not describe a resource it could not reach. Two of the best-known free French resources refused automated requests on the day these pages were written; both would have been easy to write up from memory, and both are named as unverified instead.

It will not quietly reverse any of the above. If a rule here changes, the change gets written down on the page that stated it, with its date, rather than the old sentence simply disappearing.

What it is not

It is not a school, an examining body or an accreditation of any kind, and it has no relationship with any institution that is. It does not offer tuition, and there is nobody here to correct your French — which is, on several of these pages, named as the one thing worth paying a real person for.

It is also not neutral about money, and says so openly. A small number of links here are commercial, they are marked in the paragraph where they sit, and the page about who pays for this site lists both the arrangements and the recommendations that cannot earn anything at all.

Corrections

Corrections are the only editorial process this site has, and they are genuinely welcome — particularly about something we link commercially. Prices move, vendors redesign their pages, sale banners come and go, and a figure that was right on the day it was read can be wrong a month later.

What helps most is the page, the sentence, and what the source says now, ideally with a link. The contact page has the address and a note on what is most useful to include.