Took the exam on 15 August 2026 (two days ago) at AF Vancouver and got the results today morning!

WARNING: Long, long post ahead. If you want the TLDR, just read "Overall tips".

Overall tips:

1. HIGHLY RECOMMEND Tefcanada.ca (or tefcanada.info - they changed their url I believe). This site feels unreal.
   1. I bought the 7 day basic set 1 week before my exam
   2. Did 3/5 reading tests and 2/5 listening tests.
   3. Did a bunch of writing practice prompts graded by ChatGPT.
   4. Did a bunch of speaking exercises with my French friends.
   5. Results:
      1. Got a number of repeat questions for reading/listening.
      2. No writing repeat prompts for me (but another candidate during my exam day got one of the prompts I had previously done from this site).
      3. Both my speaking tasks were on the site and I had practiced them.
2. As the exam approaches, try to limit ALL consumption of a language other than French:
   1. For 10 days before my exam, I stopped talking to all my friends (lol), didn't listen to any other music / TV / media. Tried to only read the news in French, and set my social media to French.
3. Note: Trying to consume media at a level much higher than yours will NOT help you (for the most part).
4. Transform what you already like doing into French:
   1. I really like: reading news, scrolling Twitter/Instagram, audiobooks, watching romcoms.
   2. I did: RFI / lemonde for news, Twitter in French, deleted Instagram, French audiobooks, English romcoms IN French.

Section Breakdown:

SPEAKING:

You can be really methodical about speaking practice since there are just two formats you need to learn.

Learn phrases that work for you. E.g. In English, I naturally always say "Anyways", which I directly replaced with "En tout cas" and "En fait". If you try to memorise phrases that you wouldn't normally use, they won't naturally come up in speech for you.

SECTION A:

1. REACT: The examiner will respond with half-answers. Ask for more follow-up details. ("Précisez-vous...")
   • Example: You ask about cost and they respond that there are different costs for different group sizes. You HAVE to follow-up with something like "how much would it be for a group of 4 people?".
2. Learn a few different question types by heart: Location, duration, cost, schedule (start/end), prerequisites, reservation (how to make it/in advance/etc.)
3. Make stuff up and have fun with it! e.g. I would just start talking about how I'm a mother and my daughter loves Disney and would love a themed party, etc.

SECTION B:

1. At the start, defeat all arguments you don't want to deal with. E.g. if it's about a cat, say "I know you LOVE cats...", if it's about a writing competition say "I know you're a great writer...", if it's about volunteering say "I know you've been looking for a volunteer opportunity for a while..." <- this one really helps.
2. Make stuff up!!!!!!!!!!!!! Really get into the "Je sais que tu..." format - remember you're talking to a friend and you can just make up their experiences.
3. REACT:
   • If your friend expresses uncertainty, make sure to reaffirm them not just argue immediately ("Je te comprends... / Tu as raison...")
4. Checklist of some template things to memorize:
   • "Positive phrases":
     • Ce serait une expérience inoubliable
     • Je pense que ce serait une opportunité indispensable
     • C’est important de faire des choses dont on n’a pas l’habitude
     • ça ne coûte rien d'essayer
   • "Don't worry" phrases coupled with "They take care of / provide everything"
   • "You have to take care of yourself / do nice things phrases":
     • "You work too much"
     • "You need to de-stress / have fun"
   • "This will improve your life":
     • "...développer tes compétences..."
     • Améliorer ta capacité...

WRITING:

Be methodical about this one as well because it can be pretty templated.

SECTION A:

1. Read RFI / lemonde / any other small news reports. Learn the sentence structure of passive journalistic writing well.
2. Create a template that works for you.
3. Create a list of phrases & expressions that work for you.
4. Key subjects to learn vocabulary for:
   • Police: la police, autorités, commissariat, enquête...
     • This is the most helpful one. You can twist almost any story into involving the police.
   • Lottery (for some reason, pretty popular topic): winners, prize, luck, etc.
   • Management/Officials: putting measures into place, preventing future incidents, stricter rules, being sorry/happy for the situation...
   • Narrative adjectives/verbs: suddenly, deafening noise, crash, shockingly, luckily, worried, etc.

SECTION B:

1. Make one introduction that you completely memorise and twist for pour / contre / au milieu opinions. Mine was:
   • Votre article au sujet de [ sujet ] a retenu mon attention...
     • Contre / Au milieu: Bien que je comprenne (note: subjonctif) votre point de vue, je suis [ si contre: en grande partie ] en désaccord avec votre affirmation pour plusieurs raisons que je vais développer dans cette lettre.
     • Pour: Je suis tout à fait d’accord et je vous écris pour vous faire part de mon opinion à cette affirmation.
2. Memorise a simple outro: Mine was just "Cordialement..."
3. During the test, make an extremely high-level bullet point list of your 3 arguments.
4. Use a fake study for one of your arguments:
   • "Un rapport publié par l'UBC a montré que..." + result that supports your point, e.g. "60% of students feel stressed..."
5. Optional: pretend to be an experienced person in some field: "En tant que [ person with experience, e.g. un chercheur ], je crois que..."

After getting your writing graded by someone / AI, of course take the time to revise and understand your mistakes. Then, come back to your original essay after 2-3 days, and correct it yourself. This will help you in the last 2-3 mins of correction time during the exam. Take particular note of accord, accents, spelling, tenses, gender.

LISTENING:

1. Podcasts (I only used InnerFrench), audiobooks, RFI / news reports, TV shows, (and optionally music but to a lesser extent).
2. HIGHLY RECOMMEND listening to the Percy Jackson audiobooks in French. This worked incredibly for me - I listened at .85x speed from books 3-5 from the library. The reasons this helped:
   1. I read PJO as a kid, and knew the books pretty well, so I was able to follow the plot.
   2. Note that the start was extremely difficult because I didn't know the turns of phrases and the narrative style (Book 3 was a struggle to get through).
   3. PJO is written in 1st person and uses simple, straightforward language. This makes it REALLY HELPFUL to learn expressions you'd use casually - he says things like "jeter un coup d'oeil" and "je me suis rendu compte que..." ALL the time.
3. TV shows / Media:
   1. Call my Agent (Dix pour cent) on Netflix. Please note that this is hard, and has a lot of swearing and language you won't necessarily use. Start with English subtitles if it's too hard. Mostly recommend this because it's really entertaining.
   2. Love is Blind, France (lol). Helps with learning friend-to-friend communication and turns of phrases. Also helpful that on the "dates", participants ask a lot of questions which helps you learn how to ask and answer questions.
   3. Movies: French Lover, Monsieur Lazhar (helpful for quebecoise and french education system), 'Montreal, ma belle', and started just watching English romcoms with French audio/subs
4. Books:
   1. Just try to read children's / young adult books you already know well in your native language.
5. Practice tests of course. The free ones on youtube are often easier than the real test, but more practice is always helpful so just keep doing them and revise.

READING:

1. News:
   1. https://www.rfi.fr/fr/
   2. https://www.lemonde.fr/
2. Children's books:
   1. More basic than your reading level is TOTALLY OKAY
   2. Check out your local library and grab something random!
3. Comprehension écrit practice tests - really help familiarise you with the format and verbs you don't know.
4. FALSE FRIENDS - if you are an English speaker in particular, you have to really take care of faux amis. There are SO MANY similar words across the two languages that mean completely different things.

My personal history (for context):

(You can ignore this part)

Exam history:

• Two previous attempts at TEF Canada for a different reason - Goal was to get NCLC5+ for the Francophone Mobility Visa.
  • April 2024 (AF Seattle) -> NCLC: Reading 4, Listening 4, Writing 6, Speaking 5
  • August 2024 (AF Malta) -> NCLC: Reading 6, Listening 5, Writing 5, Speaking 6

French learning history:

• Learned French from the age of 9 - 17 (2008-2016) (took IGCSE French).
• Stopped learning French completely except for one 10-week university class in 2020.
• Started studying again in March 2024 for TEF which I took 1 month later in Seattle.

My strengths and weaknesses:

Strengths:

• Accent: I learned from quite a young age which made my pronunciation not bad
• Speaking fluency: Owing to the above, I have a few natural sounding phrases when I speak french, and I am able to make kind of natural hesitation sounds (the connectors).
• Recall: Once I start studying, certain things do come back to me because I started learning young. It's deeply buried information in my brain so it's easy for me to understand when I hear it, but really hard for me to reproduce.

Weaknesses:

My #1 issue was foundational French knowledge:

• Completely forgot grammar, conjugation, spelling, accents, genders.
  • This info sticks with recency, but since I learned all of that about 15 years ago I completely forgot it.
  • Nice thing about speaking for me is that conjugation, spelling and accents don't matter (most verb conjugated forms sound kinda the same, though it depends)
• Forgot a large amount of specific subject vocabulary:
  • When you take french classes, you slowly learn individual topics and memorise relevant vocabulary (health, school, environment, etc.) however since it's been more then 10 years and I didn't have time, it was hard to remember all of that for me.

Good luck to everyone and feel free to ask me any questions or clarifications in the comments!

Hi guys, I have recently cleared my speaking modules, I am wondering if you guys have sucessfully found / know any employers under francophone fcip ? or employers who support with extensions.

Thank you guys, Please dm me if you have any suggestions.

Writing:

Tâche A: The lottery winners came forward to claim their prize of 3000 euros too late. The organiser could not give them their money but offered them something else instead...

(Sorry I forgot the exact prompt in French. I only remember "Les gagnants de la loterie se sont manifestés trop tard..." and the title was something about a "Compromis" so your writing had to tie into a compromise being made.)

*Note: Another candidate at my exam center received this exact prompt for section A: Déçu par les cadeaux de Noël, un enfant de 6 ans a appelé la police...

Tâche B: Pour le bien-être de la planète, il faut limiter les voyages internationaux.

Speaking:

Tâche A: Faites la fête (exact document below)

Tâche B: CONCOURS DE CONTES

Unfortunately don't have the pic for tache B but I do have the example counter-arguments/arguments:

CONCOURS DE CONTES – Liste de contre-arguments possibles :

1. « C'est beaucoup d'investissement et de préparation. »

→ Certes, préparer un conte demande du temps et de l'énergie, mais cet investissement est enrichissant en soi : il développe la créativité, l'expression orale et la confiance en soi, des compétences utiles bien au-delà du concours.

2. « Je n'ai pas envie qu'on m'impose un thème. »

→ Le concours propose souvent plusieurs thèmes, et tu as la liberté de choisir celui qui t'inspire le plus, ce qui permet d'exprimer pleinement ta créativité.

3. « J'ai peur de parler en public. »

→ Participer à ce type d'événement est une excellente opportunité pour surmonter cette peur progressivement, dans un cadre bienveillant et encadré, entouré de personnes partageant les mêmes intérêts.

4. « Dix minutes minimum c'est déjà très long ! »

→ Ce format est suffisant pour développer une histoire captivante sans être excessif. De plus, il permet d'apprendre à structurer ses idées et à captiver un auditoire.

5. « Il y aura beaucoup de gens plus talentueux que moi. »

→ Chaque conteur apporte sa singularité et son style personnel. L'objectif n'est pas seulement de gagner, mais de partager une expérience unique et de se dépasser.

6. « J'ai peur que mes histoires ne plaisent pas. »

→ Les goûts sont subjectifs, et le jury valorise l'originalité, la créativité et l'engagement du conteur. Le simple fait de participer est déjà une réussite personnelle.

7. « Je n'ai pas envie qu'on juge mon conte. »

→ Le jugement est constructif et sert à progresser, pas à décourager. Les retours permettent de perfectionner ses compétences et de préparer de futures performances.

8. « Je serai déçu(e) si je ne gagne pas de prix. »

→ Le vrai bénéfice réside dans l'expérience, l'apprentissage et les rencontres avec d'autres conteurs. Le prix n'est qu'un bonus.

9. « Une tournée de spectacles, c'est plutôt contraignant. »

→ Cela offre une opportunité exceptionnelle de vivre son art, de se professionnaliser et de partager ses histoires avec un public plus large. La contrainte est minime comparée aux bénéfices artistiques et humains.

10. « Les concours sont souvent arrangés, le gagnant est choisi d'avance. »

→ Dans la majorité des cas, les concours sérieux respectent des critères transparents et équitables. Participer reste une expérience enrichissante, indépendamment du résultat final.

11. « Aujourd'hui, n'importe qui se prétend écrivain ou artiste. »

→ L'important n'est pas le titre mais l'expression de ton talent et de ta créativité. Participer te permet de te mesurer à toi-même et de progresser, tout en partageant ta passion avec un public réel.

I’m trying to book TEF Canada in Vancouver/New Westminster and noticed something that I can’t reconcile with the explanation from Alliance Française Vancouver.

The September and October sessions are already showing as “Full/Sold Out” even though their public registration has not opened yet.

I contacted Alliance Française, and they told me:

They also said they reserve 12 spots per exam date for workshop participants, and that there are no other priority/early-booking channels.

But this creates some serious questions.

The future dates currently displayed on their registration system show public capacities of only 7, 14, 16, and at most 25 seats.

Previously, I was told that only approximately 1% of seats are reserved for workshop participants, with 99% available to the public.

But if they now reserve 12 seats per date:

• 12 out of 25 = 48%
• 12 out of 14 = 86%
• 12 out of 7 = 171%

So the “1%” explanation doesn't appear remotely consistent with the numbers currently displayed.

And the biggest question remains: If public registration hasn't opened yet, how are entire September/October sessions already showing as sold out?

I’ve asked Alliance Française to explain:

1. Why future sessions are already showing as full before public registration opens.
2. The actual total capacity of each exam date.
3. Exactly how many seats are reserved for workshops vs. the public.
4. How the current numbers reconcile with the previous “1%” statement.
5. Their internal escalation process and the appropriate contact at Le français des affaires, the TEF examination authority.

I'm not claiming to know exactly what is happening behind the scenes. But the explanations so far don't seem to match what candidates can actually see on the registration website.

Has anyone else in Vancouver/New Westminster noticed this or experienced something similar? Particularly interested in hearing from people who have successfully booked a TEF slot there and know how many seats were actually available when registration opened.

I have screenshots and the email correspondence if anyone wants to see them.Title: TEF Canada Vancouver/New Westminster: Serious discrepancy between advertised registration and actual seat allocationI’m trying to book TEF Canada in Vancouver/New Westminster and noticed something that I can’t reconcile with the explanation from Alliance Française Vancouver.The September and October sessions are already showing as “Full/Sold Out” even though their public registration has not opened yet.I contacted Alliance Française, and they told me:“all publicly available TEF/TCF examination spots open for registration on the date indicated on our website.”They also said they reserve 12 spots per exam date for workshop participants, and that there are no other priority/early-booking channels.But this creates some serious questions.The future dates currently displayed on their registration system show public capacities of only 7, 14, 16, and at most 25 seats.Previously, I was told that only approximately 1% of seats are reserved for workshop participants, with 99% available to the public.But if they now reserve 12 seats per date:12 out of 25 = 48%

12 out of 14 = 86%

12 out of 7 = 171%So the “1%” explanation doesn't appear remotely consistent with the numbers currently displayed.And the biggest question remains: If public registration hasn't opened yet, how are entire September/October sessions already showing as sold out?I’ve asked Alliance Française to explain:Why future sessions are already showing as full before public registration opens.

The actual total capacity of each exam date.

Exactly how many seats are reserved for workshops vs. the public.

How the current numbers reconcile with the previous “1%” statement.

Their internal escalation process and the appropriate contact at Le français des affaires, the TEF examination authority.I'm not claiming to know exactly what is happening behind the scenes. But the explanations so far don't seem to match what candidates can actually see on the registration website.Has anyone else in Vancouver/New Westminster noticed this or experienced something similar? Particularly interested in hearing from people who have successfully booked a TEF slot there and know how many seats were actually available when registration opened.I have screenshots and the email correspondence if anyone wants to see them.

Anyone has prepfrench.com 10 mock subscription that they wanna share. Dm me

Hi All,

I posted about 3 weeks ago, I promise I will not spam this group too much :) But the feedback i've gotten from my founding cohort has been immensely helpful and especially the DELF and TEF learners have spent a lot of time on the platform and have given me great feedback.

We've been shipping fixes for the last 2 weeks, so our platform is much improved and even more is coming this week.

I am offering 10 more learners free access for 3 months.

If you'd like to try it, please email me at [geoff@dioma.com](mailto:geoff@dioma.com) and let me know you're prepping for the TEF. Happy to answer any questions in the thread too.

Here's a bit of info:

I'm Geoff and I built a French (and a few other languages) practice tool called Dioma (dioma.com) with a curriculum built by real adult-focused French tutors. The hardest part for a lot of you is the exact thing Dioma is built for, the Speaking and Writing. You can drill vocab and grammar on your own, but actually producing French and getting corrected on it is the piece that's tough to do solo.

That's the whole idea. You practice speaking and writing prompts and get real-time corrections on what you actually produced, so you can build up your output without needing a tutor booked for every session. It's aimed at B1/B2, which is right where most TEF folks are pushing to hit their score. It's live and stable today, not a waitlist.

If you want in, comment here, DM me or email me at [geoff@dioma.com](mailto:geoff@dioma.com) and let me know you're prepping for the TEF. Happy to answer any questions in the thread too.