Intermediate to advanced (or ‘B2 to C1’) – where it becomes magical

Catrin and I are just back from a week in Paris with the kids, and I’ve been forcibly reminded of how tough – and then how magical – the journey from intermediate to advanced is. For me, intermediate means that you can hold a conversation, but you’re still conscious of your limitations, and it can still feel like quite hard work sometimes – and you can’t easily follow radio or TV or podcasts.

That’s almost exactly where I am with my French – I can have extended and enjoyable conversations in a 1-on-1 environment (which mostly means down the pub with my friend Dave) but I’ll often need to ask first language speakers to slow down or repeat themselves, and I can’t follow podcasts in any detail. 

Thrown in at the deep end with Parisian taxi drivers, that meant a range of experiences – when I was feeling high energy and cheerful, I had some interesting conversations about Paris and politics and colonialism and the joys of being a parent. When I was feeling tired, or not sure how friendly the driver was, it meant some fairly extended silences (with bits of Welsh with Catrin and the kids in the back, just to make sure the driver knew I wasn’t being silent in English ;-)).

It’s a roller-coaster of a learning stage. I came out of some of those taxi rides absolutely buzzing with enthusiasm and excitement, wondering how soon we could arrange to move to Paris permanently. After the mostly silent ones, though, I felt frustrated and self-critical, and grumpy that I couldn’t see any magic buttons I could press to just BE a French speaker already, without all the bloody effort. 

By the end of the week, though, my main sensation was of being tantalisingly close to being able to slide into Frenchness – and experience all the fascinating cultural shifts that open up with that linguistic sidestep – in the same way as I can move between Welsh and English. 

That last little step, though, is all about building a large enough database of listening recognition – and I haven’t found any short-cuts for that yet. It took me about a year in Welsh of listening to Radio Cymru for about an hour and a half in the car every day of the week (as well as having more and more conversations with more and more people). I can’t increase my number of daily French conversations in the same way (what with not living in Paris yet, and having a post-lockdown hatred of Zoom calls). I think I’ve got a new level of motivation to do an hour or two every day listening to French podcasts, though, fuelled by my love for Paris and how much we would all like to be able to visit more often. It’s going to be interesting to see how that works out over the next year or so.

What’s more, the kids seem up for putting in the hard yards with the new SSi French course, because they had a great time in Paris as well, and they could see (even without me preaching!) what a difference it would make to be able to understand the language. 

If you’re at this stage with Welsh, I sympathise with you. It’s brutal, because you won’t notice any change in your ability after listening to a podcast for an hour. You won’t even get to the end of the week having done an hour every day and suddenly notice a change. The only thing you’ll get – and it feels like a pretty small reward – is occasional moments of realising that you’d understood a sentence or two without needing to think about it. And then, agonisingly slowly, you’ll start to get three or four or five sentences in a row – and (as I keep reminding myself at the moment) that means you’re close to the tipping point. The journey from understanding five sentences in a row several times an hour to understanding almost everything is much, much shorter than the journey from understanding five words in a row to understanding five sentences in a row.

I’m sorry that we haven’t solved this for you with SSi yet, too. Really sorry. Throwing yourself into the app can get you to intermediate, and interesting conversations, very quickly – but it doesn’t help much with the leap onwards to the comfortable advanced levels of understanding that most people call fluency. 

I do have some ideas about what we might be able to do, though. We might have some test material that you could help us assess in the course of 2025. I’ll keep you posted 🙂 

But in the meantime, if you’re listening to as much Radio Cymru and as many podcasts as possible, keep going. If you bring the raw determination, the magic will eventually happen. Bonne chance!