About

I have been teaching French to beginners since October 2025. That is not a sentence I ever expected to write, given that my own French is only at about B1.

The Accidental French Teacher

I fell into teaching French after I joined a large Facebook group as an admin for a community of people who had dreams of living in France either full-time or part-time. The members of this group were either recent arrivals in France or living in other parts of the world.

One day, it was suggested that we hold regular meetings via the Zooms or Google Meet to allow us all to practise our French by speaking only in French during those meetings.

It was also suggested that we split people up into separate groups each run by a member of the admin team. I was new to the team and wasn’t bold enough to say that I thought the idea was unworkable.

Conversations in Broken French

Why was it a bad idea? Out of the five group admins, only one of us (Matthew) read and spoke French fluently. I could see Matthew’s group could do well as he could correct people. But if he had a mixed ability class, it would slow things down unbearably for those who could speak fluently. In my view it was best that Matthew worked with just the fluent, and those approaching fluency.

But what about everyone else?

Why Not Solve The Problem With French Teachers?

We do have group members who happen to be actual properly qualified French teachers. But we’d decided to offer this service for free. Without payment, we could not ask our teacher members to commit to definitely attending every session.

However you looked at it, we ran the risk of having to manage rudderless conversations in car crash French.

I had experience of this. How many French conversation sessions had I attended in real life where I’d rather slit my wrists than listen to another English-speaking person slowly stumble through how they spent last weekend in disastrously broken French.

I don’t believe you can improve your French by having painfully slow interactions with people who speak it less well than you do. That situation is bad enough if there is a fluent speaker running the session. But what if there isn’t?

I also could not envisage non-fluent members continuing to turn up if this was all they had to look forward to. It was a recipe for making their French worse.

Despite my reservations, the first session went ahead. But after only one of these “conversation” sessions I was so stressed by the experience of not being able to correct every single thing they said wrongly, I had to go and lie down for two days. There was no way I was doing that again.

The Solution?

First of all my French is not at beginner level. I am a good B1. But I set about designing a system so that anyone could confidently teach French to people at A1, A2, B1 and B2 level people even if their own French was, like mine, not fluent. I am a software developer of 30 years experience so along with that and of course some AI, I was able to put a system together that works well for me.

Now, with the help of my software and my system, I was able to graduate from attempting to oversee clumsy conversations in very bad French, to full-on French lessons that my students could benefit from.

The added benefit was that in the doing of this, I was improving my own French.

Who Is This System For?

I never thought anyone else would be interested in this system which I named OLL (it stands for Ooh La Langue). I mean how many B1 level speakers find themselves in my position? But then I didn’t understand how a qualified and fluent French teacher works. Not being one myself …

Enter My French Teacher

I had a French teacher for five years who was excellent at what she does. She is a native French speaker, a qualified French teacher who also ran a French language department for 15 years in an English comprehensive. She now teaches adults and school age children privately online. You really can’t get a better French teacher.

I told her what I had done and instead of laughing (which honestly is what I thought she’d do), she seemed to think it quite natural that I was teaching French. Surprisingly she said she wanted to take a look at my system so I gave her a login. She used it for a few weeks – and then told ne she wanted to use it going forward in her lessons.

To cut a long story short, my French teacher likes the system so much she wanted to support me as I improve it and get it ready for public availability.

Read the testimonials.