Dear all,
I started to lear French as a backup plan and now I'm at A2 level. To move forward to B1/B2, can anyone recommend me a tutor or class that you have taken as my current tutor can only be able to teach like B1.1 level. I'm thinking to take TCF. I would be really appreciated if you could share with me any study materials, too.
Thank you so much in advance.
- I had a private tutor, fairly cheap in my country, so not a possibility for everyone.
- I had weekly conversation lessons with a tutor on Italki.
- I also went to Tandem and found a language partner and had weekly or twice a week conversations to get comfortable with speaking. This is fairly difficult, I certainly got lucky finding an excellent language partner.
- Don't have access to my study materials anymore, I'd recommend any generic French textbook like Cosmopolite and work through them all the way from A1 to B2.
- I also got prepmyfuture which is pretty good. And it's pretty cheap too.
- I listened to InnerFrench almost religiously. One episode a day minimum while driving to work etc, then in the evening, listen to the same episode with the transcription, pausing and noting down specific words or phrases, along with the sentence as an example. I used this for Anki (a flashcard app that I used for my vocabulary)
- Do not buy flashcard decks for vocabulary, they are useless. Make your own based on what you encounter in your textbooks or podcasts.
- Two months before the exam, start exam specific prep. I wrote one article a day to practise for teh writing section and had my Italki tutor correct it and give me feedback.
- I also read french articles, one or two a day, on lapresse.ca and did the whole Anki routine with that too.
By the end of it, I had a decent vocabulary, along with example sentences for context. I was fairly comfortable using certain phrases and tenses in spoken form for the speaking section. I had a good template for the writing section that I could adapt to different topics. Reading was by far the easiest, I didn't do much specific prep for that. Your experience may vary.