French conversation lessons with a tutor

French learners arrive at conversation practice from the opposite direction to English ones. With English, people have absorbed years of films, songs and half the internet without ever speaking, so they understand everything and can say nothing. With French it is the reverse: most people studied it properly, often for years at school, and have barely heard it outside a classroom. They can assemble a grammatical sentence given a few seconds, and then the other person answers at normal speed and the whole thing collapses. That is worth knowing before you book anything, because it changes what the hour is for. If you cannot follow the reply, an hour spent entirely on producing sentences is half wasted. The part you can fix on your own costs nothing: French at natural speed, daily, in whatever form you will actually keep up with, and specifically without subtitles in your own language. Most people need a few weeks of that before paid conversation starts earning its price. What the hour is genuinely for is the thing listening alone cannot teach. A recording never asks you a question you were not expecting, never misunderstands you, and never waits while you fail to find a word. Being answered unpredictably, and having to respond before you are ready, is the specific skill on offer here. When you talk to a tutor, say which of the two problems you have; someone worth their fee will structure the hour completely differently depending on the answer.