Business French training
French that earns you the room in Paris, not just the pleasantries.
Business French lessons and corporate French training for executives, legal and finance teams, and anyone working with French offices, clients or counterparties. Programmes are written around the correspondence, meetings and negotiations your people actually handle — and reported to whoever signs the budget off.
Why companies buy this
In French, how you say it is part of what you said.
The objective is not to sound French. It is to be taken seriously in French — by clients, counterparties and your own Paris office.
Teams working with France routinely discover that competent French is not sufficient French. Meetings are more formal than the London equivalent, correspondence follows conventions nobody explains, and the register you use with a counterparty decides how seriously the next email is taken.
The commercial cost is subtle and real: the London office defaults to English, the French office concludes it is not being listened to, and the relationship is run through whoever happens to be bilingual rather than whoever owns the account.
A general French course does not fix this. Professional French is a distinct set of conventions — vouvoiement, formulae de politesse, the structure of a formal letter, the pace of a French negotiation — and it is learned deliberately.
Our tutor selection and matching is reviewed by The Good Schools Guide, and Learn&Co is a member of The Tutors' Association.
Who the programme is for
Who inside the organisation needs French?
Teams working with French offices and counterparties
People who deal daily with Paris, Lyon, Brussels or Geneva and are tired of every exchange defaulting to English. The programme targets meetings, calls and correspondence with colleagues who are not going to slow down.
Legal, finance and insurance professionals
French contractual and regulatory vocabulary, the conventions of French professional correspondence, and the precision required when a caveat has to survive translation.
Executives relocating or taking a French mandate
Landing able to work: chairing a French meeting, managing a French team, handling the administrative language of a posting, and reading the hierarchy in the room correctly.
Client-facing and luxury sector staff
Hospitality, property, luxury and professional services, where the French relationship is maintained over lunches and dinners as much as in meetings — and the social French decides whether the commercial French ever happens.
What we actually train
The business French that decides outcomes.
Register: tu, vous and everything above it
Knowing which form the situation requires, and the far harder question of when a relationship has changed. Getting this wrong reads as carelessness rather than as a language error.
French correspondence and its formulae
Emails and letters that follow the expected structure and closing formulae. French professional writing is conventional, and writing it as translated English is immediately visible.
Meetings, réunions and the right to speak
French meetings run more formally and more rhetorically than their London equivalents. Following at speed, entering the discussion cleanly, and making a structured argument rather than a list of points.
Negotiation and conditional precision
The conditional and subjunctive doing commercial work: proposing, qualifying, conceding and refusing without losing either the position or the relationship.
Sector terminology
Droit, finance, assurance, immobilier, luxe, énergie — the vocabulary of your sector, taken from your own contracts and reports rather than a generic glossary.
Hierarchy, formality and the social contract
How seniority is signalled in French, what a French client expects socially, and the lunch or dinner language that carries as much weight as the meeting did.
What the training looks like
Rehearsal for the meeting you have next week.
Selected network first, matching within it second. The tutors were interviewed and accepted into our network long before your enquiry arrived; what happens after the brief is design, selection and oversight — not recruitment.
Sessions built on your own material
Your French correspondence, contracts, decks and call agendas. Learners rehearse the exchange they have next week with the counterparty they actually have it with.
Correction that includes register
Tutors correct not only what was wrong but what was inappropriate — too familiar, too abrupt, too translated — because in professional French that is the error that costs something.
Mixed levels handled honestly
Where a team spans levels, we assess individually and stream the group, keeping the sector vocabulary common so the whole team still shares one professional French.
Scheduling that survives the diary
Early mornings, evenings and remote weeks, bought in monthly blocks rather than fixed slots, so travel between London and France does not break the programme.
How it is run
From scoping call to week-six review.
Scoping call
Twenty minutes with Maria: who is learning, what they have to be able to do in French, by when, and who signs the training off.
Level assessment
Every learner is assessed individually — speaking as well as grammar — so a mixed-ability team is grouped honestly rather than averaged into one useless class.
Written objectives and proposal
You receive objectives written as tasks, a recommended format, a schedule and a price. Nothing starts until the business has signed that off.
Specialist selection
We select from tutors already interviewed into our French network — by sector as much as by language — and you meet them before anything is committed.
Delivery around the working week
Weekly sessions online, at your offices or at ours in London, early mornings and evenings included, with a rescheduling policy that assumes business travel exists.
Reporting and the week-six review
Monthly written progress reports against the agreed objectives, attendance visible, and a founder-led review at week six to adjust pace, objectives or tutor.
Formats and investment
Three ways to structure your programme.
Companies buy corporate training in three different shapes, so we price it in three different ways. Executive programmes start at £120/hr per learner, bought in hours; open business terms start at £950 per person for ten weeks; a closed team programme is quoted in full after the scoping call, once the number of learners, the spread of levels and the frequency are clear. All figures include VAT.
Executive one-to-one
One person, one objective, complete flexibility.
A bespoke French programme for a single executive or specialist, built around the meetings, documents and clients that person actually deals with.
- Objectives agreed in writing before the first session
- Material drawn from your own documents and meetings
- Online, at your offices or at ours in London
- Monthly written reporting to the budget holder
From £120/hr
Bought in hours, per learner, VAT included: 4 hours at £120/hr (£480) month to month, down to £102/hr on 48 hours used within up to 12 months (£4,896).
Closed in-company group
One team, one syllabus, one invoice.
A group from the same organisation taught together in French, streamed by level so nobody is held back or left behind.
- Levels assessed individually, then grouped honestly
- Sector vocabulary shared across the whole team
- Consolidated reporting across locations
- Suits teams of three and upwards
Quoted
Calculated on group size, the spread of levels, frequency and whether you want us on site — quoted in full after the scoping call.
Open business group term
A ten-week term at a shared price.
Live small-group business French, for companies sending one or two people, or professionals who prefer to learn alongside others.
- Ten-week terms, maximum six people
- Professional syllabus, not a general course
- Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, London and online
- Invoiced to the company on request
From £950
Per person for a ten-week term, including VAT. A1–A2 £950, B1–B2 £1,050, C1–C2 £1,150. Maximum six people.
All figures include VAT. We invoice companies directly, work to purchase orders, and can provide the documentation, insurance and safeguarding information procurement teams ask for.
The evidence
Delivered inside law firms, hedge funds, publishing houses and global groups.
From our corporate clients
Our corporate training record.
A filmed client testimonial from our corporate training work, alongside verified reviews from professionals and companies across our languages — evidence of how we work, not all of it specific to business French.
“As English isn’t my native language, I’ve always tried to improve my skills by taking different courses, whether group sessions or one-to-one. Working with Marianne and Learn&Co has been, without a doubt, my best experience. Marianne is an…”
“I started taking lessons with Maria about six months ago in order to try and get my rusty French to a good enough level that I could use it professionally in my work as a lawyer. I cannot recommend her highly enough. Her enthusiasm and…”
“We came across Learn&Co thanks to a recommendation from a friend at Hyperion Insurance Group. He was so happy with their corporate language training that we decided to contact them and set up a trial lesson. It’s now been over 6 months…”
“I have been taking classes to improve my French and Spanish with Learn&Co for the past year and I have to say I’m loving it. I’m impressed with the quality and structure of the lessons. I feel like I’m making great progress. A few months…”
“Could not recommend more highly — a wonderful tutor. I have been tutored by Maria through work for a year and it has been a fantastic experience. The lessons are well structured (split between grammar, presentation, conversation, question…”
“I started French tutoring with Maria about 4 months ago and it has been incredibly beneficial. I work for a large financial corporation and I wanted to increase our business presence in the French speaking countries in North Africa. Maria…”
“I was looking for a mix of help with social chat in french, developing my professional french and rebooting my grammar and written french that had suffered from years of underuse. Maria is funny, engaging and highly skilful as a teacher.…”
Questions
Before you brief us.
- How is corporate French training with Learn&Co different from a language school?
- A school sells a level and a course book. We scope the commercial objective first, match a French specialist from our existing network by sector, build the material from your own documents, and report progress monthly to the person who signed the budget off.
- Our people already speak some French. Is this worth buying?
- That is the most common brief we take. The work is rarely grammar from scratch — it is register, correspondence conventions, meeting speed and negotiation precision, which is exactly what conversational French leaves untouched.
- What does Business French training cost?
- Bespoke Business French programmes are bought in hours: 4 hours at £120/hr (£480) month to month, down to £102/hr on 48 hours used within up to 12 months (£4,896), VAT included, and are quoted in full after the scoping call, once learners, objectives and frequency are agreed. Open business group terms start at £950 per person for a ten-week term (A1–A2 £950, B1–B2 £1,050, C1–C2 £1,150). We invoice companies directly and work to purchase orders.
- Can you teach at our offices?
- Yes — at your offices in London, at ours, or online for teams split between London and France. Most programmes run mixed, and the format can change mid-programme.
- How do we prove it is working?
- Objectives are written as tasks at the start — run the weekly call in French, answer client correspondence unaided, present the quarterly update in Paris. You get monthly written reports and a founder-led review at week six, with DELF or TCF benchmarking where a formal level is required.
- Can you prepare staff for a formal French qualification?
- Yes. Where a role, a visa or a French professional registration requires it, we prepare for DELF, DALF, TCF and TEF against the examination date.
- Who are the tutors?
- French specialists already interviewed and selected into our network before your enquiry arrives, with real experience of professional and sector French. The match is made within that network against your brief and your sector, with Maria overseeing it, and you meet the tutor before committing.
- Can you run programmes in several languages at once?
- Yes. We deliver in nine languages with a single point of contact and consolidated reporting, so a company training French, Spanish and German teams manages one relationship rather than three.
- What if the tutor is not right for the learner?
- We rematch, at no cost. The chemistry call before the programme starts and the week-six review exist precisely so that is a small correction rather than a wasted budget.
Other ways to learn French
Not a corporate programme? There is another route.
Ready to brief us?
Twenty minutes with Maria.
Tell Maria who is learning, what they must be able to do in French and by when. She will tell you how we would approach it, which specialist she would match them with, and what it would cost.
Maria Toubbe
- 20 minutes
- A conversation, not a sales call.
- With Maria
- Our founder, every time — not a call centre.
- No obligation
- Advice you can use even if you never book.
20 min · video call · free
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