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What a year actually buys
Julien asks the right question in line 3 and the better one in line 7, and the answers are the honest part of this lesson. A hundred and four lessons is not a magic quantity. Here is what it is. **The shape of this course.** Two years, a hundred and four lessons, something over seventeen hundred vocabulary entries, banded A1 for lessons 1 to 26, A2 to 52, B1 to 86 and B2 from 87. The CEFR bands describe what you can do rather than what you have been shown — B2 is the level at which you can follow an argument among native speakers, read a newspaper without a dictionary at your elbow, and hold a position in a discussion without rehearsing it. Having been taught the material is not the same as being at the level, and the gap between the two is closed by use, not by more lessons. **Why progress feels like nothing and then like everything.** The published guided-learning estimates put more hours between B1 and B2 than between A2 and B1, which matches what learners report: the middle of the second year is the longest stretch with the least visible return. Comprehension also moves well ahead of production, so for months you understand more than you can say and feel you are going backwards. Alex's 'par paliers' is the accurate description, and February is where people quit — not because they have stopped improving but because they have stopped being able to see it. **The two things that worked.** The carnet and the twenty minutes. Neither is clever. Writing down what you heard rather than what you were taught is how the words in this course's later lessons got chosen in the first place, and a short daily contact beats a long weekly one because the forgetting happens daily. Julien's line 9 is the summary and it is not encouragement: it is a claim about which variable matters. **And one honest caveat.** Eleven cities is not available to everybody, and nothing in this year's content requires it. The varieties of French in Blocks A to D can be met through broadcasters, films, music, novels and people who already live near you, and a learner who has never left their own city can hear all of them. The travel in these lessons is a frame for the language, not a prerequisite for it.