Canadian French for Flight Attendants

Our course is fully audio, making it easy to learn whenever and wherever you are. For your reference, each module download comes with a PDF file of the major vocabulary expressions taught in the lessons of the module. Module 6 contains bonus lessons with mock airline French tests. The full English/French scripts for the mock tests are also included in the PDF of Module 6. No other writing or reading material is included. Flight attendant recruiters will test your oral French. Flight attendants communicate orally with passengers. Flight attendants rarely ever need to read or write French with passengers. Other courses will try to simultaneously teach you listening, speaking, reading and writing. It's overwhelming. It's excessive. Other courses provide you with much more practice reading and writing, very little practice listening, even less practice speaking. In our audio course, you'll focus on improving your listening and speaking with confidence, which are essential skills for flight attendants.

We currently do not provide certification, diplomas, or certificates after course completion.

Our goal is to teach you the French you need to: 1) pass an airline flight attendant oral French test and subsequent retests. 2) work as a bilingual flight attendant (speak with passengers, make announcements/translations). Our course modules are divided up accordingly to focus on these two goals. See our Course Description page for more information.

Yes! Canada is a bilingual country and all major airlines in Canada greatly favour candidates who are bilingual (French/English). Many airlines in Canada struggle to find bilingual flight attendants, so speaking French will make you stand out in a very competitive field of applicants! Just take a look at the flight attendant job postings below from Air Canada (and affiliates), Air Transat, Porter Airlines, Sunwing, Flair Airlines, and Westjet/Encore. Many destinations and flights are required to carry French-speaking flight attendants. Being a French-qualified flight attendant will greatly improve your choices of destinations and schedules.

Simply listen and repeat out loud. The narrator will give instructions in English, then the native speakers will speak in French, pausing to allow you to repeat out loud. When a new word or phrase is introduced, the native speakers will break down the word syllable by syllable and pause to allow you to repeat and imitate their pronunciation. We teach French in a natural way, the same way you learned your native language as a child. You simply listened and repeated what you heard. Everything taught in one lesson will be reviewed in future lessons. It's perfectly fine not to get everything the first time through a lesson. Feel free to repeat a lesson or parts of a lesson as many times as you need to feel comfortable with the material. In each lesson, if you are able to speak most of the French phrases when prompted, before the native speaker says it, then you’re ready to move onto the next lesson. Our course works best when lessons and modules are done sequentially, and on a daily basis.

Repeating out loud, rather than just repeating in your mind, helps you retain new words and phrases. You can listen to your own pronunciation and hone it to match the native speakers' pronunciation. Muscle memory. Simply thinking in your mind about hitting the right piano keys does not mean you'll actually play the piano well in reality. You need to physcially practice the motion in order to get better at it. Your vocal cords, tongue, and mouth muscles work the same way. You have to physically train them to say the words and phrases by repeating them out loud. This is how you learn to speak with confidence.

It's perfectly fine not to get everything the first time you do a lesson. Feel free to repeat lessons or parts of a lesson as needed, giving you more chances to practice the phrases you feel you need more work on. If your media player allows you to change playback speed, try listening to lessons at a slightly slower or faster speed; whichever feels right for you. Don't try to do too many lessons each day. Give yourself time to absorb the material. At the same time, make sure to do some work every day, to keep the material fresh in your mind. If you come across a phrase and feel the need to look up the grammar rules about it, try to wait a few lessons before doing so. We want to you listen and repeat, to learn the phrase naturally, instead of relying on grammar. Written French is also more complicated than spoken French as many words change spelling (depending on gender/tense/etc.) but do not change pronunciation. Trust that the native speakers are teaching you the correct way to say things, even if you don't fully understand why it's said that way. Be patient and understanding with yourself. Repeat out loud. Try your best to make your pronunciation as close to the native speakers' as possible.

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You speak your native language now with natural ease, without thinking about grammar and conjugation rules. You say things and you know they're right because they simply sound right. This is the natural ease we want to give you in French. Listening and repeating is how you gain that natural ease. It's how you gained it learning your native language as a child. You listened and repeated again and again, without learning any grammar. In our experience with flight attendants trying to learn French, speaking spontaneously is the single greatest challenge they have (impromptu announcements and conversations with passengers). Despite having drilled grammar in other courses, they get stumped and draw blanks when they try to speak. They painstakingly sort through complicated grammar rules in their mind to try to translate and form sentences. This is the pattern we want to avoid. We want you to be able to converse with passengers and make announcements in French with confidence and ease. We avoid most grammatical explanations in our course, thus you may feel the need to look up grammar rules yourself. We recommend you wait a few lessons, to give yourself time to listen and repeat the phrases, learning to speak them naturally, instead of relying on grammar.

If you already know some French, you may be familiar with the material in earlier lessons. We still recommend starting from the beginning and doing each lesson out loud at least once, simply for the extra chance to practice speaking, listening and pronunciation. Many people who’ve taken French elsewhere feel much more comfortable reading and writing, but lack practice speaking and listening. In-class time with the native-speaker teacher is very limited each week and must be shared with other students, giving each individual only a few minutes of speaking time per class. Many feel nervous when talking, get stumped on grammar each time they try to form sentences, and draw blanks when trying to speak. Starting from the beginning and repeating out loud will give you the chance to practice speaking with confidence, breaking the pattern of relying on grammar to translate sentences in your mind. Each lesson and module builds on previous ones. Doing them from the beginning, in sequence, will ensure that you experience the lessons in a coherent manner.

Module 4, 5, and 6 may be beneficial to you. In our experience, flight attendants who are quite proficient in French have little issues communicating with passengers in common situations. However, the airline workplace contains a lot of technical vocabulary that's not part of the daily vernacular, and without practice, even French-speaking flight attendants sometimes have trouble translating announcements into French about delays, mechanical issues, diversions, cancellations, and other more industry-specific situations. Modules 4 and 5 cover these situations. They will teach you the phrases that you can use with passengers and for announcements in the vast majority of these less common situations. Module 6 will help you pass your French retests to maintain your French qualification.

We recommend completing all modules before going for your French test. The French you learn in later modules will still be very helpful during the test and in general. The flight attendant language you learn in later modules will also provide you with a solid understanding of the job, which will help you during the interview.

No. Flight attendants make regulatory safety announcements. (Safety demonstration, prior-to-landing announcement, taxi-in announcement etc.) We will not teach them here because they vary from one airline to another, and your airline will provide you with their version to read verbatim. In our experience, flight attendants learning French find little difficulty reading regulatory announcements. They have much more trouble with spontaneous conversations with passengers and impromptu announcements, which are what we will focus on instead.

Yes. Flight attendants are required to provide certain briefings to passengers. We'll cover the two most common briefings in Module 5: 1) Generic emergency exit briefing 2) Briefing for passengers with lap-held infants

Airport agents, baggage agents, and call centre agents also rely on spoken French to communicate with passengers. If you’re learning French for these positions, you will benefit from the first two modules of our course, where we teach you basic spoken French and how to answer common French test questions. The other modules are more specifically geared towards flight attendants and the specific terminology they use while working, which will differ from what other airport employees use.

Yes! We teach you standard Canadian French, similiar to what you'd hear in a French-Canadian newscast. In later modules, we will also expose you to more informal Quebec and Acadian accents. Accents may differ but the standard vocabulary is largely the same. You will still understand and be understood by French-speakers from other parts of the world (European French, African French, etc.)

Yes! We teach you to use formal Canadian French, but we'll also teach you to recognize informal Canadian French vocabulary and pronunciations that your passengers may use. Native speakers do not speak French like a French textbook. Their pronunciation is often informal and not completely accurate. They often use anglicisms and non-standard vocabulary. We'll teach you to recognize them so you're not thrown off when you inevitably encounter them in real conversations.