This lesson pairs two TCF Canada tasks that both put YOU at the centre: Writing Tâche 2 and Speaking Tâche 1. The tasks are different, but they draw on the same personal register — first-person, everyday vocabulary, a story or a self-portrait rather than an argument.
Writing Tâche 2 asks you to narrate a personal experience and comment on it, in 120-150 words. You need two things: a clear timeline (what happened, in order) and a closing reflection (what it meant to you). Time markers carry the timeline:
| first, then, suddenly, finally (narration sequence) | d'abord, ensuite, soudain, finalement |
Tense choice matters as much as vocabulary. Use the imparfait to set the scene or describe something ongoing, and the passé composé for the punctual events that move the story forward — often in the same sentence:
| the weather was nice, the crowd was waiting (imparfait: scene-setting) | il faisait beau, la foule attendait |
Close with a reflection formula — this is the "comment" the task explicitly asks for, and it is what graders look for:
| This experience showed me that... | Cette expérience m'a montré que... |
Speaking Tâche 1 is the entretien dirigé: a guided interview about yourself, roughly two minutes, with no preparation time. The examiner asks the questions; you answer in complete sentences, using the same kind of first-person formulas — name, age, origin, where you live, what you do, your family, your hobbies, why you are taking the TCF. Memorizing a handful of these means you are never scrambling for how to start a sentence when a question catches you off guard:
| Let me introduce myself, my name is... | Je me présente, je m'appelle... |
The cards in this lesson demonstrate the frames through one example candidate — Amara, a nurse from Lagos preparing to move to Quebec — so the answers read as real French rather than fill-in-the-blank templates; when you speak or write, swap her details for yours. Build your own answers around a fixed skeleton — introduction, personal facts, daily life, reason for the exam, closing line — and you can adapt it to almost any guided-interview question they throw at you.
