Starting French from zero as an adult in Singapore

The Alliance Française de Singapour runs its adult general French in terms of eight weeks. Once a week comes to 24 hours over the term; twice a week, at four hours a week, comes to 32. There is an intensive option at twelve hours a week over four weeks, which is 48 hours in a month. Those are the three shapes an adult beginner is choosing between, and the beginner course states no prerequisite: no minimum of French is required.

French Toast structures the same stage differently and the arithmetic is worth putting beside it. Its Beginner course is four modules, each of 20 hours, each taught two hours a week for ten weeks. Reaching the end of Beginner is therefore 80 hours of class spread across roughly forty weeks of teaching, module by module.

Read the two together and the picture stops being vague. One term is twenty-odd hours. The beginner stage is not one term; it is four modules or several terms. Nobody publishes a grid on which a complete beginner arrives anywhere in eight weeks, and the grids are the schools' own.

The Alliance Française publishes how many terms each level takes at each pace, which lets you see the shape of the whole staircase rather than the first step. A2 can be achieved within four or six terms depending on the pace; B1 within six or eight; B2 within six or eight; C1/C2 within ten or sixteen.

Multiply those by the published hours per term and the numbers land in the same place from either direction. Four terms at the twice-weekly pace is 128 hours; six terms at the once-weekly pace is 144. For B1, six twice-weekly terms and eight once-weekly terms both come to 192 hours. That arithmetic is ours, from the school's published term counts and its published hours per term — but the inputs are theirs, and the two paces agreeing is a good sign the model is not decorative.

The honest reading of that is not discouraging, it is just specific. A level of French is a low-hundreds-of-hours undertaking, and A2 sits after A1 rather than instead of it. Anyone quoting you a level by a date without quoting the hours behind it is quoting a hope.

The bottom of the Common European Framework is not vague about it. A1 describes someone who can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at satisfying needs of a concrete type; who can introduce themselves and others, and ask and answer questions about personal details such as where they live, people they know and things they have; and who can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.

That last clause is the one to hold on to, because it is where expectations usually break. A1 is defined as a level that works with a cooperative interlocutor. A teacher, a partner, a patient colleague — yes. A recorded announcement, a fast waiter, a French film without subtitles — no, and not because you are learning badly.

So the first term is real but narrow: introductions, numbers, the present tense of the most common verbs, ordering something, asking where something is, reading a menu and a sign. It is not conversation, and a school that implies otherwise is describing the second year.

The sound system comes first, and it is where being an English or Mandarin speaker in Singapore neither helps nor hurts in the way people expect. French uses vowels that neither language has: the rounded front vowel in tu, which English speakers reliably hear and produce as the vowel in too, and the nasal vowels of vin, vent and vont, which are not sequences of a vowel and an n. The r is made at the back of the mouth and is nothing like the English one. None of this is difficult in principle; it is difficult because it has to be trained by ear rather than read off the page.

Then gender, which is not hard to understand and is hard to remember, because it attaches to every noun and drags agreement behind it through adjectives and past participles.

Then the conjugation, and specifically the mismatch between what you write and what you hear. Je parle, tu parles, il parle and ils parlent are four written forms and one spoken one. A learner who studies from the page overestimates their listening; a learner who studies by ear underestimates their spelling. Both are the same fact seen from two sides, and the O-Level and DELF mark schemes both notice it.

And the numbers, which are the running joke and a genuine obstacle at the point where you need to catch a price or a phone number: seventy is soixante-dix, eighty is quatre-vingts, ninety is quatre-vingt-dix. Belgian and Swiss French use septante and nonante instead, which is worth knowing exists and is not what you will be taught here.

Look at what the schools sell and the pattern is hard to miss. The Alliance Française's adult paces start at once a week and go to twice a week and then to four times a week; French Toast's beginner modules are two hours a week for ten weeks. Nothing in either published grid runs less often than once a week. That is not an argument about pedagogy, it is a statement about what these schools are willing to timetable.

The reason is the one every beginner discovers privately. What is learned in a first term is a system that has not yet become automatic — the gender of a noun, the ending of a verb, the shape of a vowel — and a system that is not automatic decays between sessions. A fortnight's gap does not cost you a fortnight; it costs the first part of the next session, every time, which is how people arrive at their second year still doing the beginning.

So the honest planning question is not which school or which method. It is: what can you actually hold every week for the next six months, including the weeks when work is bad? A rhythm you can keep at two hours beats a rhythm you abandon at four, and it is the only part of this that is entirely within your control.

What we cannot tell you, because nobody publishes it, is whether one two-hour session beats two one-hour sessions. Both are sold in Singapore, no provider we have found publishes a comparison, and we are not going to invent one. What is published is the total, and the total is what the grids above are made of.

The generic answer — a group is cheaper, individual is faster — is true and not very useful, because at the beginner stage the two formats fail in different places rather than at different speeds.

A group gives a beginner something individual lessons cannot manufacture: other people making the same mistakes, at the same time, out loud. That is worth more at A1 than at any later level, and it is also a reason a group course at a level slightly below yours is a waste and one slightly above is a slow drowning.

Individual lessons give the thing a group structurally cannot: your own mouth corrected, every time, rather than once in twelve. For pronunciation in the first three months, and for anyone whose available slots do not match a school's timetable, that is the whole of the argument. Our guide to online versus in-person tuition in Singapore covers what the delivery format changes on top of that.

There is a third option people forget: both, in sequence. A term in a group to get the base and the habit, then individual work when the specific gaps become clear. It costs less than starting individual and works better than staying in a group past the point where you know what you are missing.

Most adults starting French in Singapore do not need a certificate, and the honest advice is not to buy one you have no use for. The DELF is a diploma for life and there is no rush to it.

It does have one use that has nothing to do with the paper. A dated session is a deadline, and a deadline is the only reliable defence against the eighteenth month of comfortable, unassessed lessons. If that is a problem you recognise in yourself, entering for A1 or A2 is a cheap way to solve it. Our guide to choosing a DELF level in Singapore sets out what each one is for, and the cost guide carries the session calendar and the fees.

Our lessons are individual and by video, with teachers based in France, at 45 €/h for general French and 50 €/h for examination preparation and school support. There is no in-person option, so a group course at a Singapore school is genuinely a different product and not one we are trying to talk you out of.

Two things are ours to state rather than to claim. There is no platform between you and the teacher, so no commission is taken out of the hour; and hours that are not used are refunded in money rather than converted into credit that expires. Both are checkable against the terms of any platform you compare us with.

The first exchange is twenty minutes and free. For a complete beginner there is nothing to assess, so it is a conversation about the goal, the honest weekly rhythm and what the first three months would contain — which is the part that decides whether this works, and the part the grids above cannot tell you.