Savor ranks the best dish in a city. That is a strange company to learn French from until you notice that the two problems are the same one: knowing what to say when the food arrives. Every course here is anchored to a city and written around the places we already rank, so the sentences are the ones you would actually use in them.
The order is the teaching. Nothing is locked, though — every stage is reachable at any time, because someone stuck on the spoken check needs the words again far more than they need to be told no.
A room, an hour, and someone who needs something. A boulangerie at 8am, the baker up since 3, you not yet caffeinated.
Most courses open on a vocabulary list. You remember a word because of where you were standing when you needed it, so the room comes first.
The ten or so words and phrases that scene runs on, one at a time, each with a note on when it is actually said.
One at a time, not as a list of ten. A list is something you scroll past; a card is something you answer.
The grammar underneath them, as a formula with examples — the shape you can put other words into.
Ten phrases get you through one morning. The pattern behind them gets you through mornings you have not read about.
The scene played out, line by line, with the translation hidden until you ask for it.
Hidden by default because reading the English first means you never had to understand the other line.
Prompts you answer before anyone is grading you.
The gap between recognising a sentence and producing one is the whole difficulty. This is where you cross it, privately.
One thing said out loud, recorded, and graded against a rubric.
A course that never asks you to speak is a reading course. This is the only stage that can tell you whether you can do it.
Named for the fluency rather than for how far in they sit, with the CEFR band beside each one.
Your first words: greeting someone, asking what things cost, finding the street you want, and enough food vocabulary to order without pointing.
The past tense, and opinions. You start saying what happened and what you made of it — comparing two dishes, describing a wine, disagreeing without being rude.
Where the grammar turns real: the imperfect, the subjunctive, relative pronouns and the conditional. Enough machinery to tell a story properly and write your first review.
Nuance and the professional register. Discourse markers, the art of concession and emphasis, the business lunch and the gala — and the literary tenses underneath them.
Writing and argument. Food journalism, criticism, the memoir and the keynote, in the literary registers those are actually written in.
Your own voice. Literary exegesis, scholarly prose, diplomatic protocol and the philosophical essay, ending on a synthesis that is yours.
150 lessons across 6 levels, anchored to Paris. Level 1 is free in every language, with no card; Savor+ opens the rest. 21 more languages have their lessons written and are waiting on recorded audio — a language course without sound is not a language course.
Open the French course →