Learning a language is not a collection of individual lessons. It is a process that requires consistency, structure and, above all, time.
I have been a private French tutor for 15 years, and I have run Anais and Co for the past seven.
In that time, we have helped thousands of people learn French. Some have made remarkable progress. Others have lost momentum, despite starting with the best intentions.
After all these years, one pattern is impossible to miss.
Results come from showing up
The clients who make real, lasting progress are the ones who take lessons every week and stay with the process for months or years.
Whether they have one lesson a week or two, the principle is the same: regular practice compounds.
A little progress one week becomes greater understanding a few months later. Things that once required concentration become instinctive. Vocabulary accumulates. Mistakes disappear. Speaking becomes easier.
There is rarely a dramatic moment when someone suddenly becomes good at French.
Progress is much quieter than that.
It comes from showing up, week after week.
The problem with selling hours
French lessons are traditionally sold by the hour.
It makes sense from a transactional point of view. You buy a certain number of lessons, use them, and decide whether you would like some more.
But I don't think it accurately represents what learning a language involves.
If you buy 12 hours of almost anything, it is reasonable to expect something relatively complete at the end of those 12 hours.
Language learning doesn't work like that.
Twelve lessons can absolutely make a difference. You can understand concepts that previously confused you, improve your pronunciation, become more confident and acquire new vocabulary.
But 12 hours cannot replace the months and years of repeated exposure required to become genuinely comfortable in another language.
The unit that matters is not really the hour.
It is time.
A more honest approach
That is why our private lessons are organised as annual programmes, with lessons taking place once or twice a week.
Not because everyone will become fluent in one year.
They won't.
And not because there is anything magical about an annual programme.
There isn't.
A year simply creates a more realistic framework for learning.
It gives a tutor enough time to understand a client properly, identify weaknesses, revisit difficult concepts and build progressively on what has already been learned.
It gives the client something equally important: continuity.
French gradually becomes part of the week rather than something to start, stop and repeatedly begin again.
Structure matters
Consistency alone is not enough.
You can spend hundreds of hours doing something badly.
This is why we have spent years developing our own curriculum, books and approach to teaching French.
A good tutor should know where you are going.
Each lesson should build on what came before it. Difficulties should be identified rather than avoided. Grammar should be revisited. Vocabulary should accumulate. Homework should reinforce lessons rather than exist for the sake of it.
There should be progression.
But even the best curriculum cannot compress time.
A tutor can explain something brilliantly. A book can organise it clearly. A lesson can correct a misunderstanding in minutes.
What none of them can do is make French familiar without repeated contact with it.
That part cannot be accelerated.
No shortcuts
The language-learning industry has become very good at selling speed.
Learn French in 30 days. Become fluent with an app. Learn while you sleep. Master a language in a few minutes a day.
I understand the appeal.
We are all looking for ways to do things faster.
But after 15 years of teaching French, I have become increasingly convinced that promising shortcuts does people a disservice.
Learning French requires effort.
It requires making mistakes, forgetting things, learning them again, being corrected, practising and continuing even when progress is difficult to see.
Most importantly, it requires time.
There are better and worse ways to learn French. There are better and worse tutors. There are better and worse methods.
But there is no substitute for showing up.
Week after week.
That is what our programmes are built around.
