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What comes after B2
This lesson closes the second year, and what comes after B2 is not more of the same syllabus. A course can carry you from nothing to the point where real French is merely difficult instead of impossible, and you are there. Past that point, an hour spent on French written for French speakers beats an hour spent on French written for you. **What these two years were.** 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. Year one was Paris and the apparatus of a life there. Year two was everywhere else French is spoken: Québec, Belgium and Switzerland, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, Morocco and Tunisia, and Martinique. If the second year did its job, you no longer think of Parisian French as the language and the rest as variations. **So here is the apparatus, concretely.** **Reading.** One novel a month, and a newspaper most days. Start where you can finish: French crime fiction is written to be read fast, and so are the shorter Modiano and Maupassant's stories. Read without stopping at every word, and look up only what blocks the sentence. For news, *Le Monde*, *Libération*, *Le Figaro*, *Le Devoir* in Montréal, *Le Soir* in Brussels, *Jeune Afrique* for the continent — read two that disagree with each other. **Listening.** RFI, France Culture and France Inter podcasts, TV5Monde, and series with French subtitles rather than English ones. Twenty minutes a day beats three hours on Sunday. Lesson 97's advice still holds for the news. **Speaking.** This is the one that does not happen by itself, and the one that matters most. A tandem partner, a conversation group, a weekly class, a trip, a job that needs it. If you have anybody like the eleven people in these lessons, keep them. **Writing.** Keep the carnet. Write to people in French. A paragraph a day on what you did is enough, and it is the fastest way to find out which structures you own and which you only recognise. **On certification.** The DELF covers A1 to B2 and the DALF C1 and C2; they do not expire. The TCF and TEF are the ones usually required for administrative purposes, and what a given procedure accepts differs between France, Québec and elsewhere and changes over time, so check the requirement itself rather than any summary of it, including this one. A certificate is proof for somebody else. It is not the point, and you do not need one to read a novel. **And the last thing.** Alex says it in the final line, and it is the one piece of advice repeated in every block of these two years: a little, and every day. The second year ends here. The language does not.