FRE2220C – Intermediate French I is the third course in the standard Florida French sequence (FRE1120, FRE1121, FRE2220, FRE2221). The C suffix reflects an integrated language laboratory component.
This is the transition course. The first year establishes present-tense communication about immediate, concrete topics; intermediate French moves toward narration across time — recounting what happened, describing what things were like, expressing what would happen — and toward reading and discussing authentic material rather than textbook dialogues. Students frequently describe it as the point where the language starts to feel usable.
Content covers a systematic review and extension of the past tenses — the passé composé and the imparfait, and the distinction between them, which is the central grammatical difficulty of the term; the plus-que-parfait; the future and conditional; the subjunctive — introduced and used in its high-frequency contexts; pronouns — direct and indirect object, y and en, and their order; relative pronouns and complex sentence construction; reflexive and pronominal verbs across tenses; comparatives and superlatives; expanded vocabulary for daily life, work, travel, health, and current affairs; reading of authentic short texts; composition at paragraph and short-essay length; listening to authentic speech at natural speed; and substantial cultural content spanning France and the wider Francophone world.
By the end students should narrate past events, express hypotheses and preferences, and handle non-routine situations — roughly the ACTFL Intermediate-Low to Intermediate-Mid level.
Offered at approximately 10 Florida institutions.
Many Florida bachelor's degrees, particularly the B.A. at State University System institutions, require 8 to 10 credits of a single world language or demonstrated equivalent proficiency. French courses in Florida are commonly carried at 4 credits — Broward carries the parallel Spanish intermediate course at 4 credits and 64 contact hours — but some institutions carry 3. Two 4-credit courses satisfy the requirement; two 3-credit courses may not. Verify the credit value and the receiving institution's specific requirement before enrolling. SUS admission also generally expects two sequential years of the same world language, which this sequence satisfies at the postsecondary level — but the two courses must be in the same language.
Worth stating clearly, because students often assume French is the less practical choice in Florida. Florida has one of the largest Haitian communities in the United States, concentrated in South Florida, and Haitian Creole is among the most widely spoken languages in the state after English and Spanish.
The relationship requires care, and a good course addresses it honestly: Haitian Creole is a distinct language, not a dialect of French, with its own grammar and orthography, and speakers of one do not automatically understand the other. But French is an official language of Haiti, the vocabularies overlap substantially, and many Haitian Floridians are educated in French. For a student heading into healthcare, education, social services, or law in South Florida, French is genuinely useful and is a reasonable foundation for later study of Creole — which some Florida institutions also offer. Students should not assume French makes them a Creole speaker, and should not conclude French is irrelevant here either.
As in Spanish and Italian, the passé composé versus imparfait distinction is what students struggle with, because English does not mark it the same way. The rough rule — completed, bounded events take the passé composé; description, habit, and background take the imparfait — is easy to state and hard to apply in real time. It is learned through exposure to narration rather than through rule memorization, which is why extensive reading and listening pay off disproportionately this term. Office hours early rather than late is the standard advice.
French agreement is more elaborate than in its sister languages, and this is the term it bites: past participles agree with the subject when the auxiliary is être, agree with a preceding direct object when the auxiliary is avoir, and behave in their own way with pronominal verbs. Students who learn these as three separate patterns with worked examples fare better than those who try to reconcile them into one rule.
TV5MONDE publishes free graded exercises built on real broadcast material, and RFI's Journal en français facile delivers daily news read at reduced speed with transcripts. Both are free, current, and pitched exactly at this level. Listening is the skill that most lags at intermediate level and the one that most responds to daily short exposure.
Students with prior French — high school study, heritage exposure, or time abroad — should investigate placement testing and CLEP French before enrolling, since these can grant substantial credit toward the language requirement and avoid repeating material. The conversation takes ten minutes and occasionally saves a year.
The sequence runs FRE1120 → FRE1121 → FRE2220 → FRE2221, appearing with and without the C suffix depending on whether the laboratory is integrated. Prerequisite is normally FRE1121 with a minimum grade, or placement. Taking the terms consecutively is meaningfully easier, since language skills decay over a long break. SCNS equivalency applies to the same number at the same level, never across numbers.
Generated August 31, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026