EyS Provence

Most expats learn French. Few learn France. Rejoignez nous sur www.facebook.com/groups/eysprovence

After years teaching in France & the US, I know exactly where you get stuck.
🌿 Cultural & language coaching for English-speaking expats.
📍 Provence & worldwide.
💬 Message me. After 20 years of teaching in France and the US, I founded EyS Provence to help expats learn French and embrace French culture, with joy and confidence! Join us on www.facebook.com/groups/eysprovence

Après 20 ans d’enseignement entre la France et les États-Unis, j’ai créé EyS Provence pour accompagner les expatriés dans leur apprentissage du français et leur intégration culturelle.

01/10/2026

October in Provence feels different when you actually live here.
The summer crowds are disappearing.
The mornings are cooler.
Terraces are a little quieter.
And if you moved here recently, something else may be changing too.
The first few weeks were probably full of things to do: paperwork, schools, finding your way around, figuring out where to shop, meeting people, trying to understand what on earth everyone was saying to you…
Then October arrives.
Life starts becoming more normal.
You have your bakery now.
You recognize a few faces.
You know which roads to avoid at 5:30.
Maybe you’ve even stopped using Google Maps every single time you leave the house.
But this is often when another feeling appears:
“Okay… I live here. Now how do I actually feel at home here?”
That part takes longer.
And strangely enough, it’s often made up of very small things: understanding a joke, having an easy conversation with a neighbor, knowing what to say when you walk into a shop, or simply not rehearsing a sentence in your head before you say it.
Settling in happens on paper pretty quickly.
Feeling settled is another story.
If you moved to France this year, what’s one small thing that finally feels normal now?

28/09/2026

Three months later, the French isn’t perfect. But life in France feels very different.

When someone starts working with me, they often expect progress to mean speaking better French. And of course, that happens.

But after a few months, the changes I notice most aren’t always the ones you could measure in a language test.
It’s making a phone call instead of putting it off because speaking French on the phone feels terrifying.
It’s walking into the market and actually chatting with the person behind the stall.
It’s understanding enough of a fast conversation to stay in it instead of switching back to English.
It’s knowing that you didn’t understand something and having the confidence to say so.
It’s also understanding France a little better. Why someone reacted a certain way. What an expression really meant. What’s expected in a situation that used to feel confusing.

None of these moments is spectacular on its own. But put them together and something important has changed.
You’re no longer organising your life around the things you’re afraid you won’t understand.
You’re simply living more of it.
And for me, that’s what progress looks like.

24/09/2026

Sometimes, the best French lesson doesn’t look like a French lesson at all.

It can happen at a market stall, over a coffee, walking through Aix or even on a hike.
Because outside a lesson, nobody has the script. People speak at their normal speed, use expressions you weren’t expecting, ask questions you haven’t prepared for… and occasionally answer something completely different from what you thought they would.

That’s exactly why I take French into real life with my clients.
At the market, for example, we’re not there to practise a perfectly prepared dialogue and tick “buying vegetables” off a vocabulary list. We talk to people. We listen. We react. And if something unexpected happens, even better — because that’s usually where the most useful learning begins.
Afterwards, we can unpack it together. What did she say? Why did she phrase it that way? What could you have answered? What would sound more natural next time?

Little by little, these interactions stop feeling like something you have to prepare for.
They just become part of your life in France.

21/09/2026

I wish someone had told me this when I became an expat: you don’t have to understand everything to be part of the conversation.

When I was living in the US, I started joining a group of women for regular Girls’ Nights. My English was good, but those evenings were a completely different story.

Several women talking at once, jokes, expressions I’d never heard, conversations moving quickly from one subject to another… At the beginning, I missed a lot. Sometimes, a lot a lot.

The women around me were incredibly kind. They slowed down, repeated things, explained a word when I looked completely lost.

And little by little, something changed.
Not because one day I suddenly understood every word. I didn’t.
I simply stopped needing to.
I could follow enough to laugh, react, ask a question, tell a story. And eventually, I wasn’t sitting there thinking about my English anymore. I was just having a night out with my friends.

Looking back, I think that was one of the moments when I really started to feel at home in the US.

I see the same pressure with people learning French today. They think they need to understand the whole conversation before they can really take part in it.

You don’t.
Understanding enough to stay in the conversation is already a huge step. The rest comes with time.

I really wish I’d known that back then.

18/09/2026

“On verra.” Such a simple little phrase… until you start living in France.

You know the words. You know the translation. And yet you can still walk away from a conversation wondering: Was that a yes? A no? Or do they genuinely not know yet?

This is one of the things I love working on with my students. Because speaking French in real life isn’t only about vocabulary and grammar. Tone, context and what isn’t said can completely change what a sentence means.
And on verra is a perfect example.

Swipe through and next time you hear it, pay attention to what comes after.
Have you ever misunderstood an “on verra”?

15/09/2026

A few weeks ago, one of my clients was still thinking about her French before she spoke. Now, she just… speaks.
Not perfectly. And that’s exactly the point.

When she arrived in Aix this summer, there was already so much to deal with: a new country, a new home, children to settle in, schools to understand, a completely different daily routine.
French was part of all of that, of course, but what she needed wasn’t simply more vocabulary or grammar.

She needed to feel comfortable actually using what she knew.
So we worked on French through the situations she was really encountering here. We talked, practised, prepared for conversations, went out into real life and worked on the little things that can make such a difference when you’re trying to find your feet in another country.

And gradually, something changed.

She stopped approaching every conversation as a test of her French.
She started trusting herself more, understanding more and speaking without needing everything to be perfect first.

That’s the progress I love seeing.

Of course I want my students’ French to improve. But I also want them to reach the point where French stops being something they’re learning and starts becoming something they simply use to live their life here.
That’s a very different kind of milestone.

10/09/2026

Sometimes I can tell a client is making real progress in less than 30 seconds.

And strangely enough, it’s rarely because their French is suddenly better.

It might be when they tell me about ordering something at the market and casually mention that they chatted with the vendor afterwards. Or when they explain a conversation with a neighbour without first telling me, “Sorry, my French was terrible.”

What I notice is that the French itself is no longer the main event.

They’re thinking about what they want to say rather than how to construct every sentence.
They react when someone says something unexpected.
They ask another question instead of ending the conversation as quickly as possible.
And if they don’t understand something, they find a way around it rather than freezing.

There will still be mistakes.
Sometimes lots of them.
But the conversation has changed.

That’s the kind of progress I look for with my clients, because living comfortably in France doesn’t require perfect French.
It requires French that you’re actually willing to use.
And very often, confidence shows up in a conversation long before fluency does.

07/09/2026

A French lesson can start with a sentence and end up being about something completely different.

A client recently told me about a conversation she’d had in French.
She had understood the words.
Grammatically, there was nothing particularly difficult about it.
And yet, she wasn’t quite sure what the other person had meant.

So we talked about it.
We looked at the French she could have used, of course, but also at the tone of the conversation, what had been left unsaid, how she could have responded naturally and what a French person might have understood from her response.

That’s a fairly typical session with me.

Because when you live in France, knowing how to build a correct sentence is only part of what you need.
You also need to know what to say when the conversation doesn’t follow the script, how to interpret people’s reactions, how formal or informal to be, and sometimes simply whether something that felt a little strange to you was actually… perfectly French.

This is why I rarely know exactly where a session will take us.

We work on the French my clients need, but we work on it through their real life in France: the conversations they’ve had, the situations they’re about to face, the things they didn’t understand and the moments when they wished they’d known what to say.
And for me, that’s where language becomes genuinely useful.

Not French for the next exercise. French for the next conversation.

03/09/2026

If you live in France, you’re about to hear one word everywhere: la rentrée.

It’s often translated as “back to school”, but that doesn’t quite capture what it means in France.

Of course, children go back to school in September.
But la rentrée is also when adults return to work after the summer holidays, sports and cultural activities start again, associations reopen their doors, schedules fill up and life seems to switch back on after August.

You’ll hear Bonne rentrée ! between adults who haven’t set foot in a classroom for decades.
Newspapers talk about la rentrée politique, publishers prepare la rentrée littéraire, and even television has la rentrée télé.

When I lived in the US, “back to school” felt very much connected to children and families.
Coming back to France made me realize just how much broader our idea of la rentrée actually is.
It’s almost a second New Year: a moment when everyone gets back into a routine and starts something again.

And if you’re new to France, there’s another reason September matters. It’s one of the easiest times of year to join something. Sports clubs, associations, language exchanges, choirs, hiking groups, art classes… everyone is starting at the same time, which makes walking through the door for the first time a little less intimidating.

So if you’ve been telling yourself, “I’d like to meet more people here, but I don’t really know where to start,” September might be your moment.

Bonne rentrée !
What are you starting, or starting again, this September?

01/09/2026

If you moved to France this summer, September may feel like the moment your new life really begins.

The first few weeks after a move tend to be taken up by very practical things: unpacking, paperwork, finding your way around, getting the children ready for school, working out where to shop and dealing with all those little administrative surprises France seems particularly good at providing.

Then September arrives.
People come back from their holidays, schools reopen, activities start again, cafés fill up and everyday life slowly finds its rhythm.

If you’re new here, this is also a really good time to start creating your rhythm.
You don’t need to do everything at once, and you certainly don’t need to wait until your French is “good enough”.
Choose a café and go back.
Try your local market.
Sign up for an activity you genuinely enjoy.
Say a little more than bonjour to someone you regularly see.
Accept an invitation even if you’re slightly nervous about following the conversation.

These things can seem insignificant when you’re doing them, but they’re often the beginning of something much bigger.
A familiar face becomes someone you chat to.
A place you visit becomes your place.
A city that initially felt foreign gradually becomes part of your everyday life.

So, if this is your first September in France, welcome to the part where you actually start building your life here.

And I’d love to know: where in France have you landed, and how is it going so far?

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Aix-en-Provence
13090

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+33666727149

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http://www.eysprovence.com/

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