The French vocabulary that actually comes up
Exam French is not general French. The same handful of themes recur, because the exams test the life you would live in Canada.
The themes
Our 206 vocabulary cards are organised across these:
Travail Logement Santé Environnement Éducation Immigration Technologie Expressions Administration Argent Transport Temps Nuances Québec
These are not chosen for variety. They are the situations the exams keep returning to — renting somewhere, seeing a doctor, dealing with an office, holding an opinion about the environment or education.
Why themed vocabulary beats word lists
A thousand random words gives you a thousand isolated facts. Two hundred words about logement gives you the ability to hold a conversation about renting — and the exam asks you to hold conversations, not to recall words.
It also helps in listening. When you recognise that a recording is about housing, you prime the fifty words most likely to appear next, and comprehension rises before you have understood a single sentence.
The Canadian part
This matters and most French courses miss it. TCF Canada and TEF Canada are set in Canada, so the vocabulary is Canadian: un numéro d'assurance sociale, la carte d'assurance maladie, un relevé de notes, un bac de recyclage, déneigement.
A learner trained entirely on French-from-France material meets these for the first time in the exam. They are not difficult words — they are just words nobody taught them.
How to learn them so they stay
Spaced repetition, which sounds technical and is not: a card you get right comes back in three days, then a week, then two, then a month. A card you get wrong comes back tomorrow.
Ten minutes a day is enough, and it is the one habit that compounds. Everything else you study decays; this is the thing that stops it.
In this app, vocabulary from the beginner lessons feeds the same review queue as the exam drills, so a word you meet in Stage 2 keeps coming back long after that lesson is finished.
Try the vocabulary drills free
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Related
Formats, points and immigration thresholds change. Confirm current requirements with the official test provider and with IRCC before you plan around them. This is exam preparation, not immigration advice.